I got the call the day it happened. A fleet owner whose truck was caught in the chain reaction reached out to me while smoke was still pouring from the westbound bore. He sent me the initial dashcam footage. His driver did not run. That driver worked to pull people out of a burning tunnel. I want to mention this to emphasize the part of the story where a driver goes above and beyond. We still have amazing drivers who represent the best part of trucking. The simpler version of this story is that truckers are the problem. Not all of them. Most of the drivers in that tunnel did everything right. Some of them were heroes. The failure here was specific, and it had a paper trail going back years.

(FYI, several reports go into a final for NTSB, and in this case, there is a Motor Carrier Report that can be read here, and it starts how you might think it typically would, with an issue with the initial visit and the principal place of business, which was a building that wasn’t built yet, and an entity leased onto another entity. https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=20081124&FileExtension=pdf&FileName=05_Green%20River%20WY%20-%20MC%20Factual%20Final_Redacted-Rel.pdf)

On Feb. 14, 2025, at about 11:34 a.m., traffic was moving westbound on Interstate 80 through the Green River Tunnel in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. The tunnel has been in service since 1966. Each bore runs roughly 1,200 feet with two lanes. Snow had fallen that morning; water dragged in on the tires had frozen on the deck, and the variable speed limit had already been reduced from 65 mph to 55 mph for the conditions. The tunnel itself was signed at 55.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, a 2006 Toyota Tundra lost traction as it exited the tunnel, struck the guardrail and spun back across the lanes. That was the trigger. A beverage hauler braked and steered left to miss the disabled pickup, clipped the wall and narrowly missed the Tundra. A second combination unit came in behind, tried to stop, and jackknifed, leaving its trailer across the right lane and its tractor sideways in the left. The roadway was now blocked, on ice, in a tunnel, on a holiday Friday.

What turned a bad wreck into a mass-casualty event came next as the crash grew into a 26-vehicle pileup, 10 passenger cars and 16 commercial vehicles by the Wyoming Highway Patrol’s count. Fire broke out. Witnesses reported explosions, which were tires and fuel going up in a confined space. Six commercial vehicles and two passenger vehicles were destroyed by fire. Three people died. Christopher Johnson, 20, and Quentin Romero, 22, both of Rawlins, Wyoming, and Harmanjeet Singh, 30, of Nova Scotia, Canada, were killed, Singh after he was trapped in his cab in the fire. Twenty people were hurt. The tunnel was closed for months.

Who was involved

The unit that the state now ties to the fatal mechanism was a 2019 Freightliner Cascadia operating for IGM Logistics Inc. out of Salt Lake City, identified in the NTSB docket as CMV 3. The driver was 24-year-old Riaz Ahmad Noori.

There is a criminal case now and the man is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise, but he is actively wanted on charges related to this crash. According to court records, Noori is wanted on two counts of aggravated homicide and one count of aggravated assault and battery, all Wyoming felonies each punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charging documents were filed in Sweetwater County Circuit Court on May 22, 2026, more than 15 months after the crash. As of late May, there was an active arrest warrant and no arrest. He also faces a wrongful death suit naming him and IGM.

Per the affidavit from Wyoming Highway Patrol Trooper Tyler Chapman, a Dodge Ram had passed the IGM semi on the left before the tunnel. As the Ram approached the jackknifed trailer, it began to slide and rotate toward the wall. Noori moved into the left lane, struck the tunnel wall, overrode the Ram’s bed, and continued into the disabled tractor-trailer. The Ram carried four people. The driver and one passenger survived. The two who did not were Johnson and Romero.

The NTSB human performance report documents that Noori told investigators he decided to jackknife his own truck on purpose, believing it would cause a crash without killing anyone. He said he cranked the wheel all the way left and braked. The truck went straight anyway, because that is what a loaded combination unit does on ice. The NTSB asked both his CDL school and his prior employer whether jackknifing is taught as an evasive maneuver. Both said the same thing. You teach drivers to read the road and slow down. Nobody teaches you to throw a 40-ton vehicle sideways on purpose.

Why it happened

Contrast that with the drivers around him. The cautious operator in the jackknifed unit ahead, the one identified as CMV 2 and run by Two Bros and Jack Company out of Oregon, had refused to chain up that morning because he treated the need for chains as a sign the road was too dangerous to run. He waited for the chain law to lift. He lifted off the accelerator, entering the tunnel. He still got caught, because by the time he rounded the curve, the disabled pickup was already across the lanes. He did not cause this. He got trapped by it.

The beverage hauler ahead of him made what his interviewer called a split-second decision to put his own tractor into the wall rather than hit the Toyota driver who was standing in the road. He blew a tire doing it. He considered it a blessing that the blowout pushed him clear of the woman. Then he parked, got out, and stayed with an injured survivor, calling her family and keeping her conscious until help arrived. He did not leave until about 1 p.m.

Chapman’s affidavit notes that 13 vehicles came to a controlled stop in that tunnel without hitting anything. Five got struck. Same ice. Same blind curve. Same 55 mph sign. The difference was neither the regulation nor the weather. “Human error was the primary factor contributing to these crashes,” the trooper concluded. Most humans in that tunnel did not make the error.

The public score isn’t always “good enough.”

The NTSB pulled the carrier’s BASIC measures, the public Compliance, Safety, Accountability data that brokers and shippers and plaintiff lawyers all look at, and none of the categories were over threshold. Unsafe Driving sat at the 51st percentile. Hours of Service at 34. Vehicle Maintenance at 47. The carrier had passed its new entrant safety audit in December 2022. It had a non-rated compliance review in September 2023. If you had run a standard vetting check the week before this crash, the system would have told you that this carrier was acceptable.

Then the NTSB and FMCSA went on-site and reviewed the history rather than the score. They found that the carrier’s operating authority had been revoked on Sept. 5, 2024, for an insurance lapse and reinstated five days later. The 2019 Freightliner that crashed was not even listed on the carrier’s insurance policy. The maintenance file for that unit held three receipts, total. There was no systematic maintenance program, which is a violation of 49 CFR 396.3. The front-left steer tire, found out of service after the crash, worn to 4/32 of an inch with steel cords showing, had been a used tire slapped on by a roadside mechanic months earlier, with no work order and no documentation of its origin. The carrier ran its dispatch out of Macedonia and had no standalone safety plan. The post-crash compliance review produced 22 violations.

The driver’s file was its own story. He held a Colorado limited-term CDL tied to a work authorization that expired in July 2025, restricted to automatic transmissions. He had been one of two dozen applicants flagged for apparent cheating on a Utah written test, had his license pulled, failed the pre-trip inspection three times, then took a circuitous route through two third-party testers that were later put on probation for not verifying English proficiency, and came out the other side legally licensed. Before IGM recruited him, he had washed out of a major carrier after three speed-related stability-control events in his first weeks and a written warning telling him, in plain language, to slow down for curves and grades. Every one of those facts existed before Feb. 14, 2025. None of them were in the score.

Why FMCSA exists, and what the rules actually are

People in this industry love to complain about the FMCSA. I have done my share of it. Strip away the paperwork gripes and the agency exists for one reason. Commercial vehicles are heavy; they are everywhere, and when a carrier cuts corners, the people who pay are usually not the carrier. They are a 20-year-old and a 22-year-old from Rawlins who happened to be in the wrong tunnel on the wrong afternoon.

The regulations are the floor. They are the minimum you must clear to legally put a truck on the road. Clearing the floor is not the same as being safe, and a clean public score is not the same as a clean history. The rules are most useful not as a pass-fail gate but as a record of behavior. A revocation for an insurance lapse is behavior. A maintenance file with three receipts is a behavior. A used roadside tire with no paper is a behavior. A driver hired straight out of a documented washout is behavior. String those together and you are looking at a pattern, and patterns predict the future.

That is the entire premise of carrier risk scoring done right. You do not grade a carrier on whether the SMS percentile is red today. You grade it on the trajectory of its decisions, because the next catastrophe is almost always pre-written in the last 24 months of choices. IGM met the floor. The floor saves nobody.

What we do about it

A few things, vet on history, not just scores. If you are a broker or a shipper, the public BASIC percentile is the start of the conversation, not the end. Pull authority history, insurance continuity, lease and maintenance posture, and driver provenance. A carrier whose authority blinked off for an insurance lapse six months ago is telling you something.

Treat licensing provenance as a risk input. The fraud-adjacent CDL pipeline is real and documented in this very case. When third-party testers get probated for skipping English proficiency checks, the drivers they passed are already on the road. Carriers and their insurers should be looking at how a driver obtained their license, not just whether the license scans.

Maintain the steer tire like a life-safety item, because it is. There is no acceptable way to run a used, undocumented, cord-showing steer tire. A real preventive maintenance program is cheap insurance against the most expensive day of your life.

Build a speed-and-conditions culture and back it up. The carriers that came through this clean had drivers who slowed for the tunnel, refused to run when chains were required, and stopped when the road told them to. That’s training, policy and a dispatch operation that does not punish a driver for shutting down in bad weather.

Give the good drivers their due. The man who put his own truck into a wall to avoid a person standing in the road, and then stayed to keep an injured stranger alive, is the actual face of this industry. The system did not produce him. His own judgment did. The least we can do is build the kind of carriers that hire for that judgment and the kind of vetting that can tell the difference before the smoke starts.

Three people did not come home from that tunnel. The history that led there was readable throughout. Our job is to read it before the next one.

The driver, Harjinder Singh, sits in the St. Lucie County jail, held without bond on three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of manslaughter. He pleaded not guilty. The case has been grinding through docket calls and discovery fights ever since. That part has gotten plenty of attention.

Here is the part almost nobody followed up on. What happened to the trucking company? Did they close, and where did their equipment end up?

The carrier was White Hawk Carriers Inc. out of Ceres, California, USDOT 2866642. In the days after the crash, with the national media camped on the story and freight-fraud watchdogs emailing FMCSA directly, the company lost its authority. By that week, its SAFER snapshot read “Not Authorized.” A small fleet, eight trucks on the books, with a violation history that ran past 80 entries over two years and an out-of-service record that ran well above the national average. On paper, it looked finished.

It was not finished.

Pull White Hawk’s public FMCSA Safety Measurement System profile today, and you find there is a compliance review dated Feb. 13, 2026. There is a safety rating dated Feb. 17, 2026. The rating is Satisfactory. A full review came in, looked at the file, and stamped it Satisfactory.

I am not telling you that it is wrong. A Satisfactory rating measures whether the safety management controls in place are adequate at the time of the review. A carrier can clean up its paperwork, change its processes, and earn the upgrade legitimately. They also pull a small sample. Thats how the system is supposed to work.

Thats where the video picks up, and that is where TEA Technologies and CarrierVerifi.com do what they do. We followed the equipment and the registrations. White Hawk doesn’t sit on one DOT number. There is a broker registration carrying the same name, MC1301740, tied back to the same Central Valley footprint. There is a White Hawk Trucking LLC on a separate USDOT. The address overlaps. The phone overlaps. The equipment overlaps. The connective indicators are there in the public record, and they are not subtle once you line them up.

None of that is automatically illegal. Operating multiple entities is legal. Holding both motor carrier and broker authority is legal. Shared addresses, shared phones, shared trucks across affiliated companies happen every day in legitimate operations. What separates a normal corporate family or private equity M&A operation from a chameleon carrier is not the existence of connections. It is disclosure. It is whether the operator told the truth about who they are and how the pieces fit. White Hawk very well may have disclosed every affiliation to every regulator and broker who asked. We do not know the why or the how.

What we know is what the records show. The equipment is shared. The address is shared. The phone is shared. The name lives on more than one number, and a carrier whose driver is charged in a triple fatality came out the other side with a clean rating while three families wait in a courtroom.

The civil side is moving too. The daughter of one of the victims has filed a wrongful death suit naming Singh, White Hawk, a company manager, and the broker that tendered the load, C.H. Robinson. The complaint walks through a safety record that was sitting in plain view before that load ever moved, including a prior reportable crash and a stack of hours-of-service and equipment violations. Does the Satisfactory rating help CH Robinson and the carrier in litigation? Time will tell because we have no objective, overarching breakdown of “what makes a carrier safe and risk-free?”

Step back and the White Hawk file is a single data point in a much bigger fight. Singh held commercial driver’s licenses out of both Washington and California after entering the country illegally in 2018. A CDL driver can only have one CDL from one state, so the carrier will have an issue there, for starters. That fact lit the fuse on the non-domiciled CDL war that has run all year. FMCSA’s audit found roughly a quarter of California’s sampled non-domiciled CDL records out of compliance. California agreed to revoke around 17,000 of them by Jan. 5, then its DMV announced an extension to March without sign-off. Secretary Sean Duffy pulled about $160 million in federal highway funding, on top of an earlier $40 million hit over English language proficiency enforcement, and floated the nuclear option of stripping the state’s authority to issue any CDL at all. Illinois got its own 30-day ultimatum. Florida took its grievance all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Court declined to step in.

Big money, big policy, big names, and underneath all of it, one small carrier in Ceres, California, that lost its authority, got a Satisfactory rating five months later, and never really left.

The trucks do not disappear. The names move. The numbers stack. What the indicators mean, I will leave to you. Watch the video, run it yourself on CarrierVerifi, and draw your own line. There is a free version, but for paid plans, you can use LAUNCH50 for 50% off for the first three months. For partners, reach out for better subscription deals and plans.

A year ago, Hunter Biden was the single most toxic name in American politics. The laptop. The crack. The federal gun conviction. The foreign business deals. The former stripper and the daughter he spent years denying was his. The sister-in-law turned bed partner. Hard to find someone who makes worse personal decisions. The right, including me, ran him like a battering ram against his own father for the better part of a decade, and it worked because someone created this guy, right? The whole family is like used car salesmen, but guess what… used car salesmen often sell you used, shitty cars with no warranty. Be a more cautious, discerning buyer.

Now look at him. New account on X that opened with “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.” Three-hour sit-down interviews. A turn on Candace Owens’ show. Picking fights with the Democratic pundits who bailed on his dad. A prediction market floated him for the 2028 nomination hard enough that the post went viral, and Trump himself stood in the Oval Office and said the guy could actually win. Even old Joe is healthy as a horse again, just a little stroke, he’s still fine. (More used car sales.)

First, Hunter has not announced anything. He’s said for years he has no interest in running. The markets have him a distant third, somewhere around 14 percent just to enter, behind Newsom and AOC. He is not the front-runner, but I will say we’re two years out and a lot changes in two years, just ask Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris.

That is the whole point. The fact that we are saying his name in the same breath as the word “president” at all is the most remarkable rebrand I’ve watched in years. Twelve months ago, he was a punchline and a federal defendant. Today, he’s “Dark Brandon Jr,” and people are buying shares on him.

How does a guy go from that closet full of skeletons to leadership material? He stopped hiding.

The mess is the message

Here’s what people respond to, whether they’d admit it or not. Hunter Biden doesn’t run from any of it anymore. The addiction, the gun charge, the bankruptcy of his old image, the hookers, the pipe, all of it, being a deadbeat Dad. He walks out and basically says: Yeah, that was me.

The second he did that, the story flipped. The mess is what makes him relatable. Sober and polished, he’s just Joe’s kid who failed up on a board seat. Owning the wreckage, he becomes something else entirely. He’s not the prince anymore. He’s the guy who blew up his life, got addicted, got arrested, got humiliated in public, and got back up. That story doesn’t say “elite.” It says, “I’m one of you.” I’m a guy with a record and a baby-mama fight and a financial disaster and demons, same as half the country. The mess is what makes him human, and human is electable.

It doesn’t even matter whether he came to the confessional on his own or the GOP dragged every bit of it into the daylight for him. The skeletons got out. What he did with them after that is the entire lesson. He took the worst PR position in the country and turned it into a brand.

He’s basically Bill Clinton 2.0. The difference is that Clinton spent his whole career parsing the meaning of “is,” still fighting his own story to this day. Hunter just adopts it. One of them is at war with who he is. The other one made it a product. If Clinton walked out tomorrow and owned every bit of his past instead of lawyering it, he’d be a rock star again in a week. Hillary could learn a lesson here, so could many others. That’s the world we live in now. Nobody cares about your closet anymore. If somebody tries to use it against you, no matter how full that closet is, you can still make lemonade out of it.

This isn’t new, and it isn’t only politics. There’s a reason Jordan Belfort sells out arenas. The man defrauded investors out of $200 million, did 22 months in federal prison, and now charges six figures to teach people how to spot the exact scam he ran. He doesn’t bury the fraud. He leads with it. The transparency is the product.

That’s the line between redemption and deception. Between a mess that becomes a message and a mess that becomes a lawsuit.

Your mess can be your message, but only if you disclose it.

The brain grades familiarity, not character

The human brain was never built to judge character. It was built to judge threat and belonging fast and on almost no information. Character takes months to verify. Familiarity takes seconds. So we swap one for the other and tell ourselves it’s judgment.

The mere-exposure effect. The more you see a face, a name, a logo, the more you trust it, no new information required. Repetition alone does the work. Lay a parasocial relationship on top of that, the one-sided bond you build watching a guy talk for three hours on a podcast. Your gut doesn’t file Hunter Biden under “stranger I need to vet.” It files him under “guy I know.” Nobody runs a background check on somebody they already feel like they know. That’s the rapport. It wasn’t earned and manufactured by volume.

Then there’s the pratfall effect. Elliot Aronson found that when a person you already see as competent stumbles, owns a flaw, knocks over the coffee, you like them more, not less. The screwup makes them human. It only works if you’ve already granted them competence. Drop the same flaw on somebody you’ve written off and it just proves you right. So the confession is leveraging credit already in the bank. Hunter owning the wreckage works because the room already spots him a floor, Joe’s kid, Yale Law, the boardrooms. The disclosure turns the standing he already had into relatability. A guy with no standing who confesses the exact same sins isn’t relatable. He’s just a defendant.

The bar was worn down, piece by piece. Repetition rewires truth itself. The illusory truth effect is the theory that a claim repeated enough times starts to feel true, regardless of the evidence. Run that on a character, and you get scandal fatigue. When the transgression is constant and everywhere, each new one hits softer than the last. The tenth scandal doesn’t move you the way the first one did. You get used to it. Once everybody in the arena has a closet, having one no longer disqualifies you. It becomes the cover charge. “They all do it” isn’t cynicism anymore. It’s just the room reading the room.

We also quit voting on character and started voting on tribe. Dan Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition shows people don’t weigh facts about a leader on the merits; they weigh whether swallowing those facts threatens their own side. A flaw in our guy gets a reason. The identical flaw in their guy is proof he’s rotten. Character got captured. The question stopped being “is this person good?” and became “is this person ours?” Once that flips, the closet doesn’t matter because nobody was really looking in it.

We also love a comeback more than we love a clean record. Dan McAdams calls it the redemptive self. The story hits hardest with the fall and the climb back, the sinner who returns. We’re wired to reward the arc, not the absence of sin. A spotless résumé reads as boring, maybe even fake. Wreckage-to-redemption reads as real. So “real” quietly took the place of “good.” We never actually lowered the standard for character. We changed what we were measuring. We started measuring authenticity, and authenticity only means you’re not hiding. It tells you nothing about whether the thing you’re not hiding is any good.

That’s the trap. Owning the mess makes you relatable. Relatable isn’t trustworthy, and likable isn’t safe. Your brain treats them like the same word. They aren’t. The operator in the branded polo is betting you’ll run the familiarity shortcut instead of pulling the data, betting the handshake and the circuit and the mutual friends do the vetting your eyes never will. Same wiring that floats a disgraced name toward a debate stage is what puts a dangerous carrier behind your podium. We don’t get conned because we’re stupid. We get conned because the shortcut feels like being smart.

The moment you conceal it, you’re a liability

The second you hide it, the whole thing inverts. Now you’re not relatable, you’re a risk. Not just to yourself. To everyone who stands next to you. The people who partner with you, sponsor you, platform you, put you behind a microphone, and smile for the camera while they do it.

This is where my world and Hunter Biden’s world meet.

I get questions all the time about me, my history, you name it. Especially in court or in depositions. Last week in a deposition, I was played a recording of me, of which there are plenty. The Attorney asked, “Is that you?” Yes, sir, that’s me. “Did you say or do XYZ?” Absolutely I did. “With that being the case and your history and your words, do you think you’re the best person to be giving advice on this?” Absolutely, I do. I wrote an article on this two years ago titled, “Damn right I did it.” This is the very reason why. Own it all. If you own it when it’s discussed or brought up, you take away the ammunition and the gun, and you become instantly relatable. It’s the only reason I get 250 million views across platforms. I’m real, and if you know me, you know it. That’s what separates me from every other content creator or writer. People know I’ve lived it, I’m real. I stay true to principles, and I am one of them.

Companies in this industry screen the wrong things. They screen employees. They run background checks on drivers, verify CDLs, and pull MVRs (well…sometimes). That’s compliance. That’s the floor. Who’s screening the associations? Who’s vetting the speakers at the conference, the sponsors on the banner, the vendors in the booths, the faces in the branded polos sitting across from the podcast mic?

When one of those people turns out to be running a chameleon carrier network with a stack of crashes and dead bodies behind it, your brand doesn’t get a pass because you didn’t know. Your brand gets a question. Why didn’t you?

A case study that’s played out recently

There’s a conference circuit in this industry. I won’t name it. The kind of event the business actually needs. In November 2025, at an Orlando event, a man sat down at a podcast microphone wearing a Sam Express polo. His name is associated with KG Line Group, a carrier that claims to operate 310 trucks from a $610,000 house in Streamwood, Illinois. He wasn’t repping his own company. He was repping Sam Express. On camera. Into a mic. At a public industry event. With fraud people, no, pros even, in the room.

Sam Express reps at that event told attendees they run 500 trucks under a holding group. FMCSA data put Sam Express Inc. at roughly 100. The rest are scattered across a web of interconnected DOT numbers sharing 139 VINs, residential addresses, sequential registrations, and the same stylized mountain logo, no matter whose name is on the door.

Three months later, a truck from that network crossed a centerline in Jay County, Indiana, and killed four Amish men. The driver had held a CDL for seven months. He was from Philadelphia. He had an ICE detainer. The carrier, 1st Choice Logistics, is part of the same ecosystem.

A Chicago consulting firm with deep ties to this network handed Sam Express “Best Trucking Company of the Year” at a black-tie gala in 2023. That same firm developed an ELD allegedly linked to backdoor access that enabled the falsification of hours-of-service records, according to a federal civil complaint. The firm’s CEO has maintained public relations and social media friendships across this industry, including with people who work in fraud prevention.

Several trucking influencers are right now pushing Sky Blue Leasing to drivers to pad the Sky Blue base and get drivers on the road. Sky Blue came to be the week my 60 Minutes piece on Super Ego went live, with millions of global views. Sky Blue is the reincarnation of Super Ego. Whether these “influencers” know it or not doesn’t really matter; they’re Eastern European/US trucking influencers, so they certainly should, if they don’t. Point being, we know Super Egos’ track record is driver exploitation. Why would pro-trucking and pro-driver “influencers” want to push the reincarnated Super Ego? This will hurt their image. Now and especially in the future.

The names I can find this morning

I checked today. Right now, I can identify at least six well-known anti-fraud professionals in this industry who are still Facebook friends with that CEO. People who attend fraud conferences. People who speak on panels about vetting carriers. People whose literal job is exposing the kind of operation this network represents.

Before the pitchforks come out, let me be fair: investigations are quiet by design. You don’t broadcast who you’re looking at. Insurance investigators, litigation support teams, and compliance pros are often contractually gagged. There are people who’ve worked chameleon carriers for years, doing excellent work, who can’t say a word because it’s wrapped in NDAs and litigation holds. Knowing something doesn’t mean you can talk about it, and staying connected on social media doesn’t make you complicit, but if your ear is to the ground, if you live in the day-to-day data, if you take the speaking fees and shake the hands, you know what’s up. Or you should.

FMCSA and Congress launched the ARCHI program 13 years ago precisely because chameleon carriers were a known, documented, quantified problem. The GAO wrote about it. The OIG wrote about it. Then the attention faded, because that’s what attention does. It burns hot when somebody dies and goes cold the second the news cycle moves on. We’re all suddenly experts again for two weeks, and then we’re not.

This is risk screening, not compliance screening

Compliance tells you whether somebody checked the boxes. Risk tells you whether those boxes mean anything.

There’s a reason we don’t put property-crime or violent offenders on routes delivering to people’s front doors, but they might be a perfect fit driving for a landfill. That’s not prejudice. That’s placement. You match the person’s risk profile to the role’s risk tolerance. There’s a reason you get a full background check just to be issued a laptop and a badge at the world’s largest retailer. There’s a reason a cop can’t have a record, because every ticket he writes gets his credibility put on trial.

This is corporate PR and risk management 101. Every Fortune 500 company on the planet runs this playbook, yet trucking, for all its talk about professionalism, still treats reputation risk like an afterthought.

A while back, an anti-human-trafficking group gave a presentation at a sheriff’s office near me. One of the speakers got brought in at the last minute, unvetted, and gave an impromptu talk. Turned out she had an active OnlyFans account and a history that ran directly counter to the organization’s mission. Somebody outed her. Last speech she ever gave for them. Not because she’s a bad person. Because nobody screened her. Nobody asked the question. When you put a person on a stage, behind a mic, under your banner, you own whatever walks up there with them.

The difference between a past and a secret

This is where the mess-is-your-message philosophy runs straight into the risk-management reality, and it’s the whole ballgame.

Some of the best fraud investigators alive are former inmates. Former scammers can spot a Ponzi from the parking lot. People with records, addiction histories, bankruptcies, and ugly chapters are doing extraordinary work right now because they stopped hiding and started helping. Hunter Biden owning his wreckage is the same move. The Wolf of Wall Street walking on stage and saying, “Here’s exactly how I did it,” is the same move.

A chameleon carrier does the opposite. Same owner. Same trucks. Same dangerous practices. New name, new DOT number, new insurance policy, new branded polo at the next summit. The concealment is the point. The absence of disclosure is the product.

When you share a stage, a sponsor banner, a podcast mic, or a friend request with someone operating in concealment, you’re not guilty by association, but you are exposed by association. The litigation risk is real. The reputational risk is real, and “I didn’t know” gets thinner every single time someone dies, and the data was sitting right there in FMCSA’s database the whole time.

So screen your associations the way you screen your employees. Vet your speakers the way you vet your drivers. Audit your sponsors the way you audit your carriers.

Your mess can absolutely be your message. Hunter Biden is the loudest proof of that I’ve seen in a decade, and the man may end up on a debate stage because of it, but other people’s mess becomes your problem the second you let it stand next to your name without asking the obvious question. The difference is disclosure. Always has been.

30ish years ago, we went from the closed doors of the ICC to the FHWA and then the FMCSA in 2000. We opened a door controlled by the industry and the market through deregulation, and we went from 17,000 to 750,000 trucking companies. We’re still trying to fix the front door. That’s your legislature in action, so before you jump on that pro-trucking Senator or Congressman's wagon, dig in and take a look at how long they’ve had their hands in this very muddy industry and process; odds are some of these dinosaurs helped break it. I personally am looking forward to these folks questioning leadership about why trucking is in its current state. Most of the time, the question can be answered by installing mirrors in the House and Senate office buildings, where some of these antiques have become fixtures of bureaucratic failure so long that they’ve molded to their chairs while becoming extremely wealthy as career consumer politicians. That’s much of our issue. We’ve passed this Motus “buck” so long that the chickens had to come home to roost. Those same legislators are hoping you forgot how Motus got here.

The Motus registration system went live on May 14, 2026, and the rollout has not been smooth. Carriers are locked out. Compliance professionals are filing bug reports faster than FMCSA can process them. Insurers and their clients are struggling. Social media is not being kind. None of that changes the fact that the system Motus replaced was a patchwork of platforms built decades ago that could not verify who was registering, could not prevent a revoked carrier from walking back in under a new name, and could not fulfill a statutory mandate passed by Congress in 2012. The problems with the launch are real. The problems with the old system were worse, and the administration that finally pulled the trigger on the transition inherited a project that two previous administrations had started but neither had finished. Keep in mind, Administrator Derek Barrs has barely been on the job 247 days. Motus was being piloted 60 days later to the day. Point being, this didn’t start today. Let’s break down when it started, how we got here, and where we go from here.

On May 14, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration retired the Unified Registration System, the Licensing and Insurance public filing system, and the registration functions of the FMCSA Portal. In their place, the agency launched Motus, a single centralized platform tied to Login.gov identity verification, designed to replace a fragmented collection of aging systems with one dashboard for USDOT number applications, operating authority, biennial updates, insurance filings, and carrier record management.

Within days, carriers began reporting login failures, unauthorized access errors, screens returning raw JSON instead of a usable interface, and processes hanging mid-transaction. Compliance professionals who earn a living doing FMCSA registration work found themselves unable to complete basic tasks. One carrier posted a screenshot showing the system returning a raw error. So… when are we fixing Motus, and how do we comply with the rules when the system won’t work for us? Garrett Allen at SearchCarriers called it one of the worst software releases he had ever witnessed. The frustration is real.

FMCSA responded with two separate statements. The first acknowledged the issues in the measured language of a government agency aware that its system is not working: the agency recognized the challenges, called resolution an absolute priority, and committed to working through the problems. The second, from Administrator Derek Barrs personally, carried a different tone, more direct, more accountable, and more aligned with the posture this administration has taken on enforcement. Neither statement pretended the rollout was going well. Both are committed to fixing it.

I am not going to pretend the launch has been acceptable. It has not. People who need to register, update their records, file insurance, and maintain their authority cannot reliably do so right now, and that is a problem that affects the livelihoods of every carrier and compliance professional in the country. I am also not going to pretend that the system Motus replaced was working, because it was not, and the history of how we got here matters if you want to understand why this administration made the decision to launch despite the risk, and why the end result, when it arrives, is going to be worth it.

Twenty years of trying

The statutory mandate for a unified registration system dates to the ICC Termination Act of 1995. Congress told FMCSA to consolidate its registration processes into a single electronic system. The agency didn’t do it. The Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act of 2005, known as SAFETEA-LU, repeated the requirement and added specifics. The agency still didn’t do it. The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act of 2012, known as MAP-21, mandated it again with additional requirements for fraud prevention, identity verification, and stronger vetting of new applicants. That was 14 years ago.

In 2005, FMCSA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Unified Registration System. In 2011, it published a supplemental notice incorporating the new congressional mandates. In August 2013, it published a final rule establishing URS and laying out a phased implementation. Phase 1, covering new applicants for USDOT numbers and operating authority, went live in December 2015. It worked. It screened 100 percent of authority applications for disqualified carriers, issued more than 100,000 new DOT numbers, and removed more than 360,000 dormant records.

Phases 2 and 3 never happened. Phase 2 was supposed to migrate existing carriers to the new system for biennial updates and record management. Phase 3 was supposed to consolidate the USDOT and MC dockets into a single identifier. In January 2017, the final week of the Obama administration, FMCSA published a rule indefinitely suspending the remaining URS phases because the IT infrastructure was not ready and the state partner systems had not been tested for compatibility. That suspension remained in place throughout Trump’s first term and Biden’s entire term. For nine years, the industry operated on Phase 1 of a three-phase system, with everything else frozen in place.

During that nine-year gap, the registration system sat on infrastructure built in the 1990s and early 2000s. Identity verification was minimal. A carrier could register with an email address and a self-reported name. The system could not reliably detect that a revoked carrier’s officer was filing a new application under a different LLC at the same address with the same phone number. The chameleon carrier problem that has dominated enforcement headlines for the past two years grew in the shadow of a registration system that was not built to stop it and had not been upgraded to try.

Why this administration pulled the trigger

When Secretary Duffy took office in early 2025, he inherited a registration system that had been in partial implementation for a decade, a chameleon carrier problem that had become a national news story, a statutory mandate that remained unfulfilled 13 years after Congress passed it, and an agency workforce that had never been resourced to process the volume of new registrations the system was generating. Administrator Barrs arrived in October 2025, 10 months later. The decision to build and launch Motus was made because the alternative, continuing to run on a system that everyone knew was broken, was no longer defensible.

Motus was designed to do what the old system could not. Tie every registration action to a verified identity through Login.gov. Validate business information at the point of submission. Provide role-based access so that only authorized individuals can modify carrier records. Integrate with the fraud detection tools that ARCHI pioneered but could not fully execute on the old infrastructure. Consolidate the half-dozen disconnected systems that carriers, insurers, registered agents, and compliance professionals had been navigating for years into a single platform and to finally fulfill the statutory requirement that Congress passed in 2012 and that three administrations had failed to deliver.

The scope of the replacement is part of why the launch has been difficult. Motus did not replace one system. It replaced several: URS for new applications, the FMCSA Portal for record management, the Licensing and Insurance system for financial responsibility filings, and the various interfaces that supporting companies used to file BOC-3 designations, insurance policies, and other documents on behalf of carriers. Each of those systems had its own user base, workflows, and data structures. Merging them into a single platform while migrating millions of records and maintaining regulatory continuity is, to put it plainly, one of the hardest things a federal agency can attempt in the IT space.

Systems break on launch

I say this as someone who has built systems from scratch, not even knowing what I was doing at first. After all, I’m a farm kid turned truck driver turned risk guy. Unless it's harvest season in VA, then I’m back to being a trucking farm guy. But my site started with no code and no users in February 2026. Four months later, it serves nearly 1000 users across federal investigators, law firms, insurers, and carriers, with more than 30 API integrations and millions of records. Every single one of those integrations broke at least once. They still bug out and break right now. Data sources changed formats without notice. Edge functions returned errors that took hours to diagnose. Updates to one component broke three others. That is what building software looks like. It is not pretty. It is iterative. Anyone who tells you they have launched a complex system without post-launch issues is either lying or has not launched anything complex. Samsung even struggles to roll out updates, and then we get the patch. It happens. The issue here is that this failure is affecting livelihoods, but the failure isn’t new in 2026. The failure started decades ago as a bureaucratic process that Duffy and Barrs are fighting to actually bring into compliance with the law. I think that’s worth noting.

Samsung pushes firmware updates that brick phones. Apple has released iOS versions that killed battery life and cell reception. Microsoft’s Windows updates have caused blue screens across enterprise deployments. Google has shipped Chrome updates that broke major websites. These are companies with tens of thousands of engineers and budgets measured in billions. FMCSA is a federal agency with constrained procurement processes, a fraction of the technical staff, and the additional burden of complying with government IT security standards that private companies do not face. That does not excuse the bugs. It provides them with context from people who have been playing in this industry and its messy systems for decades.

The end state

When Motus is working as designed, a carrier applying for a new USDOT number must verify their identity through Login.gov before the application is accepted. That single change eliminates the ability to register anonymously, the first step in every chameleon carrier’s book. The system will validate business information at submission, checking that the address is real, the entity exists, and the people behind it are who they say they are. That eliminates the mailbox suites and virtual office addresses that ghost carriers have used as their principal place of business for years.

When an existing carrier’s authority is revoked, and the same officer files a new application at the same address with the same phone number under a different LLC name, the system will have the data integration to flag that application at the point of entry rather than relying on a downstream investigator to catch it during a manual review that may not happen for months. Motus provides the infrastructure to do it at the front door, rather than after the carrier is already on the road.

For insurers, the system provides a verified filing environment in which policy filings are tied to a verified entity rather than to a self-reported name and DOT number. For registered agents, it provides a single portal for BOC-3 filings, replacing the fragmented process they have been using. For compliance professionals, it provides one login, one dashboard, and one place to manage everything that currently requires navigating four or five separate systems with different credentials and different interfaces.

For enforcement, which is ultimately the point, Motus provides the data infrastructure that the current registration system lacks. A system that can verify identity, validate business legitimacy, flag related applications, and integrate with inspection and violation databases in real time can catch the next ghost fleet before it accumulates 7,505 inspections across 46 states under 32 nominally separate authorities. That is the end state. It is not here yet. It is coming.

Where we go from here

The bugs need to be fixed, and they need to be fixed fast. Carriers that cannot access the system cannot comply with the law, and carriers should not be penalized for a system failure that is not their fault. FMCSA has already indicated that it will not cite carriers for compliance issues caused by Motus access problems, and the agency needs to make that commitment explicit, public, and enforceable for as long as the transition issues persist.

As an industry, we should also give this administration credit for doing what the two previous administrations did not. The Obama administration started URS and stalled it. The Biden administration inherited the stall and let it sit. The current administration, under Barrs and Duffy, decided to build, fund, staff, and launch a new system, knowing the transition would be painful and that the political cost of a rough rollout would fall on them. They launched it anyway because the old system was failing in ways that were getting people killed, and because a statutory mandate that Congress passed in 2012 has not been fulfilled.

Administrator Barrs has said the agency bit off more than it could chew and would keep chewing anyway. That was about the chameleon carrier crackdown, but it applies here too. Motus is the infrastructure that makes the crackdown stick. Without a registration system that can verify identity and validate business legitimacy at the point of entry, every carrier the agency shuts down can walk back in under a new name within days. We documented exactly that pattern in the hotshot ghost fleet investigation. Thirty-two carriers, 6,082 VINs, and every time the agency killed one authority, the trucks were running under a new one within 48 hours. The FMCSA shut them down just as fast. The fraudsters are on the run. The issue is, they're like roaches, so the work must continue both at the front door and within the nest. That is what a registration system without identity verification allows. Motus is built to stop it. It is not there yet. It will be, and when it is, the industry will look back on this launch the way it looks back on the ELD mandate, a painful transition that nobody enjoyed going through and nobody wants to go through again.

If you run freight into, through, or anywhere near British Columbia, you need to watch Bill M217, and by watch, I mean we’re just looking for Royal Assent; it’s already passed. The Dashboard Cameras in Commercial Vehicles Act was passed on third reading with unanimous all-party support in May 2026. Once it receives royal assent, which could happen any day, the clock starts. Six months later, every heavy commercial vehicle operating on a B.C. highway needs a forward-facing dash cam that meets specific technical requirements. Late 2026 or early 2027 is the realistic compliance date.

Not a proposal. Not a discussion. Passed. Unanimously. British Columbia is about to become the first jurisdiction in Canada to mandate dash cams on heavy trucks, and, as written, the bill extends across the border.

The bill applies to trucks, tractors, buses, and vehicle combinations with a gross vehicle weight rating over 11,793 kg. That is roughly 26,000 pounds. If you think in FMCSA terms, reset your brain. This is not a 10,001-pound rule. This is a Class 8 rule. Your semi is in scope. Your light service van is not.

The camera requirements are based on the bill and committee discussion:

• Forward-facing only. It has to record the road through the windshield. Driver-facing cameras are not required under this mandate.

• Continuous recording during operation. You cannot turn it off. You cannot obstruct it. If the truck is moving, the camera is rolling.

• Minimum 1080p resolution with night vision capability.

• Minimum 72 hours of footage retention on board.

The vehicle owner is responsible for installation and maintenance. If the truck is leased, that duty shifts to the lessee. Drivers are responsible for ensuring the camera is functional and unobstructed, so a camera check needs to be part of your pre-trip.

Footage is protected under B.C.’s Personal Information Protection Act. The regulations that spell out exactly how footage is accessed, seized, or shared by law enforcement have not yet been written. The bill sets the rule. Cabinet writes how later.

The Alaska Problem

There is no road to Alaska that does not go through British Columbia. The Alaska Highway runs roughly 1,300 miles from Dawson Creek, B.C., through the Yukon to the Alaska border. Every overland load moving between the Lower 48 and Alaska crosses B.C. and crosses an international border twice.

The rule keys on operating on a B.C. highway. It does not key on where the truck is plated. A Texas carrier running a heavy load up ALCAN to Fairbanks falls under the recording requirement while on B.C. roads, just like a Surrey-based outfit. Non-resident is not a loophole. B.C.’s Commercial Transport Act already regulates out-of-province trucks through its permitting framework.

Most Alaska freight by tonnage goes by barge out of Tacoma or Seattle. The road handles full truckloads, heavy equipment, oversized loads, flatbed loads, specialized work, time-sensitive freight, and some freight simply transiting Canada on a U.S.-to-U.S. trip. If that is your lane, plan to be compliant before the wheels touch B.C., not after a scale operator points at your windshield.

The Alaska run carries its own rules beyond this camera law. Cabotage still applies. You cannot pick up and deliver domestic Canadian freight en route. Your loads move under in-transit customs handling. Your drivers operate under Canadian hours of service while they are north of the border, and those rules are not identical to U.S. rules. In 2025, B.C. Premier David Eby floated tolling U.S. commercial trucks transiting to Alaska as a tariff response. It never took effect, but it showed how the province thinks about its leverage. B.C. knows it owns the only road, and it has shown it is willing to use that.

Why This Matters Beyond B.C.

Is this a signal, not just a rule? When a jurisdiction passes a dash cam mandate unanimously, it means the political resistance to requiring cameras on trucks has collapsed. The arguments about driver privacy, cost burden, and government overreach that have stalled camera mandates everywhere else did not land in B.C. Not a single legislator voted against it.

If you are a fleet that already runs cameras, this is a non-event. You probably already exceed the spec. Your real task is to confirm that your current hardware meets the retention and resolution requirements and that you have coverage for every unit.

If you are a fleet or an owner-operator that does not run cameras, the question is not whether mandates are coming. The question is how fast they spread. B.C. is first. It will not be the last. The insurance industry wants cameras. The plaintiff bar wants cameras. FMCSA recorded more than 5,400 fatalities involving large trucks in 2023. The regulatory momentum is in one direction.

What to Do Right Now

Figure out which of your trucks touch B.C. If you do not have a clean list, that is step one.

Check whether the cameras you already run meet the spec. Most fleets that have cameras do not fail to have one. They fail on the details, usually retention or resolution. If your current setup stores less than 72 hours or records below 1080p, that is your gap.

Put a camera check in the pre-trip. Define what happens when a camera goes offline mid-route. Sort out in writing that the recording duty falls to the lessee for leased trucks.

Six months sounds like plenty until you factor in procurement, internal approvals, installation scheduling, policy updates, and driver communication. Start with the gap analysis now, and you phase the rollout. Wait, and you turn every truck into an emergency the same week.

I wrote a deeper breakdown of the technical requirements and compliance timeline on the Motive blog if you want the full spec sheet.

The bottom line is that B.C. just told the industry that cameras on trucks are no longer optional, so whether you run the Alaska Highway or never cross the border, we see the direction Canada is going with dashcams. My guess is…BC is not the last stop.

You can find and download my Surface Transport Department of War and Federal Freight Assessment State of DOW Freight here.

The session was for the Irregular Warfare Center after General Dorman invited me to speak with a panel drawn from the Army’s surface deployment command. Serious people in a serious room, asking whether this country still trusts the movement of its own freight?

Not the cargo. Not where it’s going. The act of moving it. The most ordinary thing any of us in this business does, and the people who plan how America projects force is now calling it contested ground.

There is no separate, hardened, military-only road network in the lower 48. The truck hauling a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle out of Oshkosh runs the same I-75 you do. The Department of War moves billions in freight every year through the exact same civilian system you and I work in. That system is broken just about everywhere you care to look. I pulled 8 million inspection records to find out how bad it was.

The civilian system is already gone

Set the military piece aside for a minute and just look at the industry we live in.

The license is for sale. FMCSA has closed 550 training schools and pulled 3,000 third-party testers off the registry, with another 4,500 on notice. That’s the supply chain for the credential itself. One examiner used gold envelopes containing $520 in cash for a passing score, and when his graduates were retested honestly, eight in ten failed. A Massachusetts trooper rigged CDL tests for guys he called “brain dead” in text messages, in exchange for a driveway and a bag of Twizzlers. His code word for a fixed test was “golden handshake.” My own reporting tied more than 6,000 fraudulent licenses to thirteen deaths.

The medical card isn’t much better. A single fraud-mill bust invalidated 6,000 driver certifications at once. A real DOT physical runs 30 to 45 minutes. The examiners cranking out hundreds a month out of a McDonald’s Dining Room in Northern CA aren’t examining anybody. They’re selling paper, and the drivers walking out with it are carrying the sleep apnea and the heart conditions that a real exam is supposed to catch before they get behind 80,000 pounds. Some of these Doctors are literally based in gas stations.

The logging device on your dash was never tested by anyone. There are 1,133 registered ELDs and the registration is self-certification. The maker says it complies, the agency lists it, that’s the whole process. No government testing, no cybersecurity review. Revoked makers re-register under a new name within days, with the same firmware behind a new logo. It’s 60% white label, close one, open a dormant that’s lying in wait. That box is wired into your truck’s CAN bus, the network that runs your brakes and steering, on a 1983 protocol with no authentication. Researchers have already shown they can take over braking and steering through that bus. Nobody’s tested whether somebody can do it to a truck under a military load, because self-certification means nobody ever has to. I took a class through SAE for less than $1,000 that showed exactly how to hack the CAN bus.

The companies don’t even stay dead. A carrier gets shut down on a Friday, files a new authority the next week, or has an authority lying in wait under a name one letter off the old one, and is back on the road with the same trucks out of the same lot by month’s end. CBS called Super Ego Holding the most notorious chameleon scheme the agency has ever dealt with. FMCSA found 400 to 500 carriers registered to addresses with no trucks at them, including roughly 700 companies stacked into one 2,000-square-foot building in Signal Hill with a “No Trucks Allowed” sign in the parking lot. Super Ego didn’t just reincarnate after my 60 Minutes segment and investigation; it reincarnated the same week as Sky Blue Leasing and turned to none other than Lawyers Limited to be their BOC 3 agent. Lawyers Limited is a ghost agent. Why? Because they want to limit the ability of people they hurt or kill to serve them in civil litigation. They want to slow accountability. They also got smart and registered in Delaware this time, so now there’s no “Alexander Mimic” clearly on the face, just a Lawyers Limited agent. They pay “influencers” foreign ones, of course, like Rate per Mile TV and Chris Kuna Drive, to push the lease and in-house financing so they can pad their base of exploited drivers without them recognizing the Super Ego name.

Theft went digital while we were all watching the road. The FBI’s April 30 bulletin put cyber-enabled cargo theft at $725 million for 2025, up 60 percent. The play is simple: hack a broker’s email, post fake loads, hijack a real carrier’s FMCSA profile, swap out its contact info and insurance, and reroute the freight. Two separate $30 million government shipments of computer chips went that way and were never recovered.

That’s our system. Now watch what happens when defense freight gets loaded onto it. My statement to those watching and listening from the Department of War? “Our entire civilian trucking surface transport system is comprised end to end, and these are the carriers and drivers you’re sourcing to move military and federal loads.

Same trucks, defense load

When a certified inspector runs a full Level I inspection, the 37-step inspection, the one where somebody actually crawls under the truck, measures the brakes, checks the frame, pulls the logs, on a government freight vehicle, 49.6 percent get put out of service. Half.

If you’ve ever crossed a scale on a Level III and rolled on after they glanced at your logbook, you know why the “average” number looks survivable. A Level III never touches the truck. It’s a paperwork check. The aggregate hides the fact that the minute someone looks for real, one in two government loads is on equipment that shouldn’t be moving.

Narrow it to pure military freight and the installation numbers get wild.

The SDDC 841st Transportation Battalion, the Army unit that runs force projection through the Charleston Strategic Seaport, the port we’d actually deploy through, came back at a 100 percent out-of-service rate. Ten carriers, eleven inspections, 76 violations, not one clean truck. Oshkosh Defense, the company that builds the JLTV and the heavy tactical fleet our brigades fight from, had its loads moved by carriers failing between 43 and 62 percent. Red River Army Depot, the Army’s only organic repair base for combat wheeled vehicles, sat at 47.6. Total Military Management, which moves service members’ households during PCS season, ran 54.5 percent. More than half.

Then there’s the subcontracting. The shipper “US ARMY” appears in my data, attached to 251 different carriers across 306 inspections. A new, unknown company for damn near every load. No continuity, no relationship, no safety baseline, because the carrier hauls one Army load and disappears. “US MILITARY” shows 173. “US NAVY” shows 73. The National Guard: thirteen carriers, thirteen loads, zero repeats.

The prime here is the Defense Freight Transportation Services contract, $2.3 billion over seven years, run by Crowley. Over the first contract, Crowley grew its carrier network 500 percent. By the time a driver pulls up to the depot gate, he can be four or five layers of subcontracting below the prime, and the honest answer is that neither Crowley nor USTRANSCOM necessarily knows who he is. A clearance at the top of the stack is worthless when a stranger shows up to take the load.

The drugs. Every controlled-substance hit on a DOD carrier was an automatic out-of-service. One carrier hauling for the Department of Defense got cited four times in eighteen months. Narcotics. Amphetamines. Alcohol on duty. Drugs again. It still holds a Satisfactory rating. Nobody pulled its defense work after the first, the second, or the third.

This is happening on your interstate

This isn’t a story from some far-off theater. It’s on the road in your county right now.

December 9, a Chinese national who’d crossed the border illegally in 2023, gotten work authorization, and been handed a New York commercial license eight months earlier, rear-ended a tractor-trailer on I-40 in Tennessee while watching a video on his phone. He killed Kerry Smith, a 31-year-old American driver. When the troopers gave him an English proficiency test, he failed it.

In November, ICE picked up an Uzbek national wanted since 2022 for membership in a terrorist organization. He was driving commercially on a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL. A Real ID. The federal verification system had cleared him. The same credentials we hand to people moving defense freight cleared a wanted recruiter.

Since June, more than 9,500 drivers have been put out of service for failing an English standard that sat on the books, unenforced, for nearly a decade. People working the gates at installations have described drivers handing over a bill of lading they couldn’t read and running the whole conversation through a phone translator. On hazmat. On classified loads. The security protocol is a stage play when the driver can’t read the paper or talk to the gate.

McVeigh rented a Ryder truck. The man who killed eight on the West Side Highway held a CDL and operating authority. There are eleven million trucks on American roads, and TSA’s trucking security program has been unfunded since 2009. Five hundred twenty-one thousand interstate carriers, no required security training, none.

Why it’s a security problem and not a paperwork problem

Take any one of these findings on its own, and it’s a compliance data point. A bad OOS rate. A chameleon flag. A drug hit. An expired authority. By itself, each one gets a shrug. When the same carriers, the same addresses, the same insurers and ownership webs keep surfacing across crashes, theft, insurance churn, identity swaps, and severe violations, that overlap stops being noise. It becomes a picture.

The reason no one sees the picture is that it’s filed in pieces. FMCSA’s safety data, the DOD procurement system, the DFTS carrier network, the insurance system, and the authority registry each hold a fragment, and none of them talk to each other. The contracting officer can’t see the crash record. The FMCSA analyst can’t see the political donations. They were built in isolation, and the isolation is exactly where an adversary lives.

That’s what Dorman meant by contested below the threshold of conflict. You don’t need a missile to degrade American logistics. You need a shell company, a hijacked carrier profile, a $30-a-week log-spoofing service, somebody’s advertising on Facebook, and a regulatory system too fragmented to catch any of it. Stack on top of that the Chinese-operated terminals at our ports, the Chinese-built cranes standing over most of them, including ten Strategic Seaports, a logistics platform with visibility into what’s moving, and you have an adversary that can see and shape our freight without firing a shot. There is still no routine screening of defense carriers against the 1260H Chinese military companies list. None.

May 14, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport that brokers can be sued under state law for picking unsafe carriers. Kavanaugh wrote that preemption can’t create a black hole where nobody answers for safety. That ruling runs straight through the DFTS brokerage chain, and the carrier data I just walked through, the 125 percent OOS rates, the four-alert carriers, the drugs in the cab, is now evidence in a negligent-selection case. The courts are about to demand what the procurement system should have required long ago. I now personally handle over 25 broker liability expert witness cases, only 10 of which I had before the verdict.

What actually has to happen

I don’t write fifty-page assessments to scare anybody. There’s a fix, and most of it isn’t complicated. Verification has to ride the load, not just sit on the contract. The clearance at the prime has to follow the freight down through every subcontractor, and the government bill of lading needs to name the carrier that actually shows up, not just Crowley.

Cap the subcontracting at one layer below the prime, with the subs disclosed and approved in advance. Unlimited, undisclosed subcontracting is the hole through which everything else crawls.

Screen every carrier and owner-operator against the 1260H list automatically when the load is tendered, not in some after-action review six months later.

Kill ELD self-certification and require real third-party cybersecurity testing, with CAN bus standards on defense vehicles. That box is the least-examined attack vector in the whole picture.

Fund TSA trucking security. It’s been dark since ‘09. The Postal Service is already pushing unvetted, non-domiciled drivers out of its network, which means it is ahead of the Department of War on this. Let that sit for a second.

The reason I can put these numbers in front of you is the platform my team built, sitting on millions of carrier records, and the inspection and crash data I’ve been quoting all the way down this page. The verification piece, LoadVerifi, is a cryptographic chain-of-custody tool that confirms at every pickup and handoff that the driver is the one who was dispatched, the credentials, the truck, the plate, are real and current, the truck matches, and the load didn’t get passed to some carrier nobody approved. A hash at every step, a court-admissible trail at the end, sixty seconds, and a text link for the driver, but that’s not all. We track your load end-to-end, regardless of which telematics vendor you use and have in your truck, and we issue a hash chain QR-coded BOL to the parties in the hash chain transaction. We do all that for well under $50 per shipment. Knowing the driver, the truck, the carrier, the IDs used, and the location of the load are real and unchanged is huge for peace of mind, and it is the solution. We built it for tobacco, firearm, and alcohol clients who were having loads compromised or stolen. We built it for sensitive and high-value shipments and our own customers, but there’s no reason the military and every other shipper right now moving anything of value isn’t developing it or using ours. I’ll give you the code for you to copy. You don’t even have to use ours. Just do it.

I’m not a neutral party on that last one, and I’m not going to pretend to be. I built it because I got tired of documenting a problem that nobody had the tools to close. The recommendation holds whether the answer is my platform, somebody else’s, or something a contractor stands up in-house: you have to be able to prove who moved the freight. Right now, for 251 different carriers hauling under one Army shipper name, nobody can.

The stagecoach robber filled out a form

I keep landing on the same line from my book. The road agent who knocked over a Wells Fargo stage in 1875 had one thing going for him: nobody could verify identity across territory lines. Cross into the next jurisdiction, and you were whoever you said you were. We’re literally running 2026 freight the same way Wells Fargo did in 1875.

The chameleon carrier who kills a DOT number on Friday and kicks off a new one the following week is the same criminal working the same weakness, separated by 150 years of technology and not much else. The deregulation that gave us cheaper, faster, more flexible freight in 1980 also quietly removed the friction that used to screen out the bad actors. We went from 17,000 carriers under the old regime to more than 800,000 now, overseen by an agency of about 1,000 people.

The stagecoach robber crossed into the next territory and started fresh. Today, he fills out a form online. The crime didn’t change. The scale did. That scale is now riding on the same trucks that carry our ammunition, our tactical vehicles, sensitive federal freight, and hazmat.

Should we shut down the CTPAT FAST Lane and inspect every truck? I’d argue we should at least at a high level. Roughly 35,000 commercial trucks cross into the United States every day. About 20,000 from Mexico. About 15,000 from Canada. That is approximately 12.9 million truck entries per year according to BTS data, and every single one of them is governed by a regulatory framework that relies on door markings, self-reported data, and trust. Are we catching some, sure, but for every one we catch, how many drive right by undetected?

I’ve spent some time on cloned trucks on I-35, cargo theft rings using forged carrier identities, and ghost fleets that report one truck to the FMCSA while operating hundreds. Every one of those investigations led back to the same root cause: the American freight system has no mechanism to verify that a truck is who its markings say it is. Nowhere is that vulnerability more consequential than at the borders.

Border 101: Two borders, two completely different systems

The first thing most people in this industry get wrong about cross-border trucking is assuming that both sides of the border work the same way. They do not.

The Southern Border and The Commercial Zone

Mexican domiciled carriers cannot haul domestic freight in the United States. Under US cabotage law, they are restricted to a commercial zone near the border, a federally defined area extending roughly 25 miles from the crossing, sometimes more, depending on the municipality. Within that zone, Mexican carriers can perform drayage, picking up and dropping off international freight. To move a load beyond the commercial zone and into the interior of the United States, the freight must be transferred to a US domiciled carrier with US operating authority.

This is how the Laredo corridor works. A Mexican carrier brings a trailer across at the World Trade Bridge. The load is dropped at a yard inside the commercial zone. A US carrier picks it up and runs it to Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, wherever the freight is going. Some operations, like the one we investigated involving Super Transport International, solve this with a dual-company structure: a Mexican parent that handles the Mexico side and a US entity that handles everything outside the zone. Same family, two countries, shared equipment. It is common and legal.

Laredo is the busiest commercial land port in the Western Hemisphere. Approximately 3.03 million trucks crossed at Laredo in 2024, representing 38.8 percent of all US-Mexico truck traffic. El Paso handles about 640,000. Otay Mesa has about 1.06 million. Hidalgo about 710,000. Total southern border truck crossings run around 7.3 million per year.

The Northern Border: Full Access

Canada is different. Under USMCA and the legacy NAFTA framework, Canadian-domiciled carriers have full access to US highways. There is no commercial zone restriction. A Canadian carrier can pick up a load in Surrey, British Columbia, and deliver it to Miami, Florida, without transferring the freight to a US carrier. The CDL reciprocity between the US and Canada means a Canadian commercial driver’s license is recognized in the United States. Canadian drivers operate under Canadian hours-of-service rules while in Canada and switch to US HOS when they cross the border.

Detroit handles about 1.13 million truck crossings per year. Port Huron, which has been absorbing overflow from Detroit due to construction near the I-75/I-96 interchange, processed about 1.06 million in 2025. Buffalo handles about 865,000. Blaine, Washington, about 330,000. Total northern border truck crossings are approximately 5.27 million per year.

Both borders participate in the FAST program, the border-crossing component of C-TPAT. FAST-enrolled carriers get dedicated lanes, reduced inspections, and expedited processing. The premise is the same on both borders: CBP trusts you enough to look less closely at your trucks. It’s the TSA Pre-check of cross-border trucking.

What’s happening on the Southern Border

The I-35 corridor between Laredo and San Antonio has become the most documented truck-based human smuggling route in the country. Last night, another 38 were discovered in a trailer that ended up on fire. Since January 2022, DPS has recovered more than 500 people from commercial motor vehicles on or near I-35 in Webb and La Salle counties. In May 2026 alone, DPS stopped two professional and supposedly cloned commercial trucks on the same stretch of highway eight days apart, each carrying 20 or more people in the sleeper berth.

DPS stated that at least one of those trucks was a professional clone, a newer-model Volvo with manufacturer markings identical to those of a legitimate C-TPAT-certified fleet, down to the unit number and font. The second truck, a Peterbilt, stopped eight days later, was also described by DPS as cloned. These were not magnets or tape. These were organized operations that invested real money in professional markings and wraps to create trucks that could pass visual inspection at any checkpoint, scale, or dock. I say supposed because these announcements were near immediate and an FMCSA source stated on condition of anonymity, “often carriers appearing to be legitimate will haul dope or smuggle, traffic people until they’re caught and then…”That’s not our truck. Never seen that driver before. They’re off the hook.” While we have no reason to suspect these aren’t cloned, there is room for skepticism about cross-border cloning, given the considerable expense, research, and knowledge that go into these vehicles. Unit numbers are real, VINs are real, the truck is nearly new, and data elements are real. The entities and people cloning these trucks are going above and beyond in many cases, even cloning FedEx and UPS trucks. One commenter on LinkedIn said, “We shouldn’t judge the entire border zone or an individual carrier for this behavior.” The border zone provides its own element of criticism; all we’re doing is republishing accurate FMCSA and border data. The objectivity in this is simple regurgitation of government data that people just don’t have readily available. We’re journalists.

The cloners did not pick a random carrier. They picked one whose C-TPAT status means reduced border inspections. The trust was the target.

On the violation side, the data from our cross-border risk model at Tea Technologies shows systemic patterns across the Mexican carrier population. English language proficiency violations, which became an out-of-service criterion under CVSA in June 2025, are widespread at border zone inspections. CDL violations are a recurring finding. The STI network alone had five CDL violations across connected entities in under two years, including three on the Mexican parent.

The Mexican parent entity in the STI investigation, Super Transporte Internacional SA de CV, currently has Driver Fitness and Maintenance issues. It has 12 crashes and 159 violations across 35 reported trucks.

What is happening on the Northern Border

The northern border does not have the same human smuggling crisis. What it has is drug trafficking through commercial vehicles and a systemic fraud problem that is unique to Canadian trucking.

In November 2025, CBSA arrested a truck driver named Satnam Singh at a British Columbia border crossing after a detector dog team found 314 kilograms of methamphetamine concealed in a commercial truck and trailer returning to Canada from the United States. In a separate case, two Ontario truck drivers were charged after CBSA seized $43.7 million worth of cocaine at the border.

These are not isolated incidents. Commercial trucks crossing at Detroit, Port Huron, Buffalo, and Blaine carry the same access and the same trust assumptions as their southern counterparts. A C-TPAT-enrolled carrier crossing at the Ambassador Bridge gets the same reduced scrutiny as one crossing at the World Trade Bridge in Laredo. If a carrier’s identity can be cloned on the southern border to smuggle people, it can be cloned on the northern border to smuggle drugs.

Canada also has its own cross-border trucking fraud problem that has no direct equivalent in the United States. The Driver Inc. scheme, which parliamentary hearings in 2025 exposed in detail, involves carriers misclassifying employee drivers as independent contractors to avoid payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, and insurance obligations. The scheme creates a layer of identity ambiguity in the driver pool: a driver operating as “Driver Inc.” may not appear in the carrier’s employment records, may not be covered by the carrier’s insurance, and may not be subject to the carrier’s safety protocols. Parliamentary hearings revealed deep rifts within the industry over the practice, with major carriers and enforcement agencies calling it a safety and tax-fraud issue.

British Columbia just passed Bill M217, requiring forward-facing dash cams on every heavy commercial vehicle over 26,000 pounds operating on B.C. highways. The rule applies to any in-scope truck on a B.C. road, regardless of where it is registered, meaning US carriers running the Alaska Highway are covered. The bill passed unanimously. That kind of political unanimity on a camera mandate tells you something about the direction of cross-border enforcement.

The C-TPAT problem

C-TPAT was designed to secure the supply chain against terrorism. The program works by giving trusted trade partners expedited border processing in exchange for implementing enhanced security protocols. The concept is sound. The implementation has a gap that has hundreds of people and hundreds of kilos floating right through it.

C-TPAT’s published Highway Carrier Security Criteria require tracking and monitoring of conveyances, but the standard can be satisfied with a paper activity log. It does not require cameras, geofencing, or real-time tracking technology. It requires a seven-point conveyance integrity inspection before each crossing, but there is no mechanism to verify that the truck presenting at the crossing is actually the carrier it claims to be.

When a carrier earns C-TPAT certification, every truck with that carrier’s markings inherits the trust. CBP does not scan the VIN against the carrier’s registered fleet. CBP does not match the unit number against a real-time fleet database. CBP reviews the markings, checks FAST enrollment, and waves the truck through. If someone puts the right markings on a different truck, the clone inherits the trust too.

While we document cloned C-TPAT trucks being used to smuggle 40 people in eight days, CBP is expanding the program. The C-TPAT Pilot Program Act of 2023, signed into law as Public Law 118-98 in October 2024, authorizes CBP to extend C-TPAT eligibility to non-asset-based freight brokers. TIA held a meeting with CBP leadership to implement a pilot with 10 broker participants. The program is getting bigger at the exact moment its foundational assumption, that trust equals security, is being exploited.

What the data shows

We built a cross-border risk model at Tea Technologies that profiles every foreign-domiciled carrier operating on US highways. The numbers tell two very different stories depending on which border you are looking at.

Southern Border: 5,901 Mexican Carriers

Our platform tracks 5,901 Mexican-domiciled carriers with active FMCSA registrations. Those carriers have generated 141,270 inspections, producing 410,097 violations and 50,680 out-of-service orders. The aggregate OOS rate is 24.5 percent, meaning roughly one in four inspections results in a truck or driver being placed out of service.

The behavioral violation data breaks down the specific failure modes. English language proficiency violations total 13,005 across 1,765 carriers. No valid CDL violations, the strongest single predictor of crash involvement, totaled 1,404 across 871 carriers, with 1,289 placed out of service. Vehicle maintenance OOS violations total 17,352 across 1,990 carriers. Unsafe driving violations total 836 across 397 carriers. Hours of service and ELD violations total 569 across 203 carriers.

Three carriers in the Mexican population have both unauthorized passenger violations and no valid CDL violations, a combination our system flags as a potential trafficking signal warranting immediate investigation. Seven carriers match at least one global watchlist, including those from OFAC, the FBI, and trade control screening lists.

The cabotage detection data reveals where these carriers are actually operating. Texas accounts for 7,555 inspections with a 30.5 percent OOS rate, but 6,120 inspections were recorded in US interior states, outside any border or commercial zone, with a 34.8 percent OOS rate. Interior inspections are a cabotage indicator. A Mexican domiciled carrier inspected in Tennessee, Arkansas, or Alabama is operating well beyond the commercial zone.

Northern Border: 16,568 Canadian Carriers

The Canadian carrier population is nearly three times larger at 16,568 carriers, reflecting the full highway access Canadian carriers receive under USMCA. Those carriers have generated 103,207 inspections, producing 76,688 violations and 14,288 OOS orders. The aggregate OOS rate is 10.7 percent, less than half the Mexican carrier rate.

The behavioral violation comparison shows that English language proficiency violations total 59 across 55 Canadian carriers, compared to 13,005 across 1,765 Mexican carriers. CDL violations total 165 compared to 1,404. Drug and alcohol violations total 25 compared to 5. But hours-of-service violations are significantly higher for Canadian carriers, at 3,451 across 1,495 carriers, reflecting the longer haul distances they operate into the US interior. Unsafe driving violations total 3,519 across 1,366 carriers, also higher than the Mexican population in raw numbers due to greater interior exposure.

Zero Canadian carriers have unauthorized passenger violations. 127 Canadian carriers match at least one global watchlist, higher than the Mexican population in raw numbers but representing a much smaller share of the total.

The comparison

Mexican carriers generate 2.9 violations per inspection. Canadian carriers generate 0.74. Mexican carriers have a 24.5 percent OOS rate. Canadian carriers have 10.7 percent. 64.2 percent of Mexican carriers are CRITICAL or HIGH risk. 21.6 percent of Canadian carriers are. The southern border is not the same problem as the northern border. The scale of the violation burden, the driver qualification gaps, and the risk profile are fundamentally different.

Yet the C-TPAT program applies the same trust framework to both. A C-TPAT-enrolled carrier crossing at Laredo with a 30.5 percent OOS rate environment gets the same reduced scrutiny as one crossing at Detroit, where the OOS rate environment is half that. The program does not differentiate based on population-level risk. It differentiates based on individual enrollment. That means a carrier that earns C-TPAT certification in a high-risk corridor inherits the same trust benefits as one operating in a lower-risk environment. The trust is not calibrated to the threat.

On June 4, 2026, a semi-truck carrying 39 people fled the Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias in Brooks County on US-281. DPS troopers pursued, deployed spike strips, and the vehicle caught fire. All 39 people exited safely. That makes two active smuggling corridors in South Texas: I-35 through Webb and La Salle counties and US-281 through Brooks County. The combined total of people recovered from commercial motor vehicles in the South Texas corridor since January 2022 now exceeds 600.

The identity thread

Every border security measure, C-TPAT, FAST lanes, reduced inspections, expedited processing, is built on the assumption that the carrier presenting at the crossing is who it says it is. That assumption is not verified at the point of contact.

On the southern border, we now have documented cases of professionally cloned trucks exploiting that assumption to smuggle people. On the northern border, we have documented cases of commercial vehicles being used to smuggle hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine and millions of dollars in cocaine. In the cargo theft space, we have the Manhattan DA indicting eight Uzbek nationals for impersonating legitimate carriers to steal $4.5 million in goods. In the insurance space, we have ghost-fleet networks reporting one truck while operating hundreds of trucks under multiple identities.

All of it runs through the same gap. A truck with the right markings is assumed to be legitimate. A carrier with the right number on its MCS-150 is assumed to be operating the fleet size it reports. A driver with the right paperwork is assumed to be qualified. None of it is verified in real time. FMCSA is working on that.

The technology to close this gap exists. Biometric identity verification, VIN matching against real-time fleet databases, and telematics-based chain of custody from load tender to delivery. We are building it at Tea Technologies through LoadVerifi. The tools are not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the regulatory framework designed in an era when the only way to identify a truck was to read what was written on its door. That era is over. The criminals know it. The system has not caught up.

Thirty-five thousand trucks a day. Two borders. Twelve point nine million crossings a year. The primary identifier at the point of entry is still painted on a door, or sometimes taped on.

While most of the trucking industry has been focused on tariffs, ELD enforcement, Chameleon carriers, fraud and the non-domiciled CDL crackdown, a labor bill just cleared one of the rarest procedural hurdles in Congress and is headed to a floor vote that it is widely expected to win.

I have to start off by saying I am not pro-NLRB. My grandfather, Roman Gissel of Gissel Packing, literally started with nothing and shut down an empire rather than bargain with the NLRB, and the Gissel Packing case remains the fundamental case law for NLRB bargaining cases. Today, the NLRB is back at it. H.R. 5408, the Faster Labor Contracts Act, reached 218 signatures on its discharge petition on May 20, 2026. A discharge petition forces a bill out of committee and onto the House floor for a vote, bypassing committee chairs, regular order, and the normal legislative process. It is one of the most aggressive procedural tools available in the House, and it almost never succeeds. This one did. The floor vote is expected this month.

If you run trucks and you have union exposure, or you think you might someday, pay attention.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to impose a compressed, federally mandated timeline for first-contract negotiations between an employer and a newly certified union. Here is the sequence:

Day 10 after union certification, the employer must begin bargaining. Day 100, if no agreement has been reached, federal mediation is triggered through the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Day 130, if mediation fails, binding interest arbitration is initiated. Day 144, an arbitration panel is seated and empowered to impose a complete first collective bargaining agreement covering wages, benefits, work rules, and all related terms.

That is a maximum of 120 days of actual bargaining, 90 days of negotiation, plus 30 days of mediation, before a government-appointed arbitrator writes your labor contract for you. The employees do not vote on the imposed contract. There is no ratification requirement. The arbitrator’s decision is final.

Under current law, the bargaining process is intentionally flexible. Employers and unions negotiate on their own timeline, with NLRB enforcement mechanisms available if either side bargains in bad faith. The process can take months or years. That flexibility exists because different industries, different companies, and different workforces have different realities. A first contract for a 50-driver LTL terminal in Ohio looks nothing like a first contract for a pipeline construction crew moving across six states, which looks nothing like a first contract for a parcel sorting facility. The current system accommodates that. H.R. 5408 does not.

The American Pipeline Contractors Association sent a letter to the full House on June 4 opposing both the bill and the discharge petition, calling it “a clear attempt to circumvent committee jurisdiction” and warning that it “creates a predictable end-game arbitration effect that will distort incentives on both sides of the table.”

APCA’s members are merit shop pipeline construction contractors. They operate fleets of commercial motor vehicles, heavy haul trucks, equipment transporters, and service vehicles across complex geographic and regulatory environments. But you do not have to be a pipeline contractor for this bill to matter.

If you are a trucking company with Teamsters representation, this changes your bargaining dynamic. If you are a non-union carrier watching organizing activity in your terminals or among your drivers, this compresses the timeline from certification to imposed contract to under five months. If you are a freight broker that contracts with unionized carriers, contract cost structures could shift in ways that ripple through your rate negotiations.

The Teamsters represent workers at UPS, ABF Freight, TForce Freight, Yellow’s former operations, and dozens of LTL and specialized carriers. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has been one of the most active unions in the freight sector. Under the current framework, first contract negotiations can extend for a year or more, giving both sides time to understand the operational realities of the business before committing to terms. Under H.R. 5408, that clock runs out in 120 days and someone who has never dispatched a truck, managed a terminal, or priced a freight lane writes your contract.

The discharge petition is the bigger item for concern. The Faster Labor Contracts Act is a provision lifted directly from the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (the PRO Act), which has failed to advance on a bipartisan basis across multiple Congresses. Proponents are isolating this one piece and using the discharge petition to bypass committee review, CBO scoring, and stakeholder input.

The discharge petition succeeded with 218 signatures, meaning that every Democrat and at least 4 Republicans signed. There are currently 17 Republican cosponsors on the bill. Fisher Phillips, one of the largest management-side labor law firms in the country, says a House floor vote is “widely expected to pass given the bipartisan coalition that signed the discharge petition.”

The Senate is less certain. The bill would need 60 votes to advance past a filibuster, but Fisher Phillips notes a “meaningful possibility” that the White House could issue a Statement of Administration Policy in support, given the administration’s efforts to appeal to working-class voters. If that happens, it could provide political cover for additional Republican senators to support the bill.

The coalition opposing H.R. 5408 is broad. The American Pipeline Contractors Association, the Independent Electrical Contractors, Americans for Prosperity, and dozens of industry associations have come out against it. The core arguments are consistent: the bill replaces voluntary bargaining with government-imposed outcomes, eliminates employee ratification of contracts, expands the role of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service beyond its current facilitative mandate, and creates perverse incentives where both sides position for arbitration rather than negotiating in good faith.

APCA’s letter makes a point that applies directly to any fleet operation: “Projects in this sector require long planning horizons, specialized skilled labor deployment, and coordination across complex geographic and regulatory environments. Introducing externally imposed contract terms, decoupled from project economics and operational constraints, creates uncertainty in cost structures and execution risk.”

Replace “projects” with “freight operations,” and that sentence describes every trucking company in America.

The AFL-CIO is urging every House member to sign the discharge petition and pass the bill…of course they are. Their argument is that employers delay first contract negotiations to run out the clock and discourage union membership. The AFL-CIO says that, based on experience in other countries with similar arbitration frameworks, binding arbitration rarely results in arbitrated contracts because the threat of arbitration incentivizes both sides to reach voluntary agreements faster.

Trucking operations involve multi-state regulatory compliance, fluctuating fuel costs, seasonal freight patterns, driver classification issues, equipment financing, and insurance structures that are fundamentally different from a manufacturing floor or a retail operation. A government arbitrator writing a contract for a trucking company in 144 days without understanding those realities is not bargaining reform. It is a roll of the dice with your cost structure.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act is expected to pass the House this month. The Senate is the firewall, but the political dynamics are shifting in ways that make passage less impossible than it looked six months ago. If you are a fleet operator with union exposure, now is the time to understand what this bill does, not after it becomes law.

Talk to your labor counsel. Talk to your trade association. If you are an ATA member, an OOIDA member, a TCA member, or affiliated with any state trucking association, ask what their position is on H.R. 5408 and what they are doing about it. This bill was not written with trucking in mind, but it applies to trucking, and the people who wrote it are not going to carve out an exemption for an industry they did not think about.

A 120-day clock and a government arbitrator. That is what is on the table. The House vote is expected any day.

I’ve done a few hundred interviews and appearances at this point. Over the past week at the Motive Vision conference, more people asked me about one of them than all the others combined. So let me answer it, and then let me answer the question underneath the question, the one everybody really wants to ask.

The 60 Minutes piece didn’t start in a studio. It started with months of work on the Super Ego investigation, the kind of slow, unglamorous record-pulling and network-mapping that nobody films. Eventually, that work put me in a studio in Washington, D.C., for what turned into several hours of interviews, show-and-tells, and a ride-along in a 2025 Kenworth W990. Makeup chair, the whole nine yards.

I was being interviewed by Bill Whitaker. A man who interviews heads of state and world leaders sat across from a farm kid-turned-truck driver from rural Virginia and took him seriously. I’m not too proud to tell you that meant something. Their team is extraordinary. Look, I’m a Fox News guy, that’s no secret, but I have enormous respect for CBS and the professionals over there. The CBS Sunday Morning segment we did some undercover work for, Michael Kaplan, and that crew, are exceptional people. We met up again at MATS. True professionals, everyone.

It didn’t stop there. We did an in-studio interview with Will Cain in Dallas. There are contributor pieces running across the country right now, with more coming from Bloomberg, Epoch Times, and a few others. And underneath all the media, the actual work keeps growing, dozens of expert witness cases, including over a dozen broker-shipper liability matters, half of them filed before the Montgomery verdict reshaped that whole area of law.

So to the dozens of you who asked: yes, it’s been wild. CBS was great. The team was great. Motive Vision was a blast. All of it, real. Now the question underneath the question.

Almost everyone who asks about 60 Minutes follows it with the same thing, just phrased a hundred different ways. How do I get there? How does a CDL driver, or somebody stuck in some obscure corner of their own profession, get to a place like that?

The honest answer is almost insultingly simple. Work hard. Commoditize yourself, make your knowledge into something the market actually needs and can’t easily get elsewhere. And be consistent. But above all of it, be consistent in principle.

That last part is the whole game, and it’s the part that sounds easy in a sentence and costs you everything in practice. Consistency in skill gets you noticed. Consistency in principle is what makes people trust you with their cases, their stories, their cameras, and their reputations. It’s why a network legend will put you on the record, and why attorneys keep calling. You become the person whose answer doesn’t change based on who’s in the room or who’s paying.

What nobody sees when they ask how I got here... They don’t see the no-vacation years. The 24-hour days. The 120-hour weeks. The investigations were built one record at a time at 2 a.m. because that was the only hour left. The studio chair looks like the destination. It’s not. It’s a byproduct. It’s what falls out of the back end of years of showing up the same way, whether anyone was watching or not.

So if you’re in the driver’s seat right now, wondering how to get to the studio, stop chasing the studio. Get obsessively good at one thing the world needs. Commoditize yourself by becoming the or an authority. That can be a lot of work in trucking. Getting not only educated in but spending years getting hands on familiar in the mechanical elements, the human resources and hiring elements, the safety and compliance elements, the insurance elements, the instructor and reconstruction elements, the coaching and training elements, and tying them all together to understand the overall risk elements is a lot of work. Be the same person on a bad day that you are on a good one. Put in the hours, nobody’s counting. The recognition, the interviews, the Bill Whitakers of the world, those come later, and they come on their own. I don’t have agents. I don’t have PR firms emailing people telling them “we have an authority on trucking who can talk about Montgomery,” people recognize who the authorities are from the work you do and the fruit of your labor. Don’t get it confused, it takes work.

If you feel like it’s not for you, know that my mother left when I was three, my Dad shot himself the same day. I am the son of addicts who didn’t even meet other people, or learn anything until I was 4. I’m an aspergian with ADHD, Who went on to be raised by grandparents and then to being the only legally emancipated minor in VA. There’s so much more to that backstory but the point is, you can come from anything and anybody and have all the issues in the world or anything thrown at you. You can have all the adversity and roadblocks and you can change wherever you are or whoever you are to commoditize yourself and that history to make the life for yourself and your family the life you really want. You just have to put in the work, learn something new that compliments your history, and spend years becoming and networking with authorities.

Know there will be others, maybe even amateurs that fall into a place of percieved authority with or even before you and that’s alright too. The second part is not begrudging someone else their easily won or their hard faught recognition. Don’t be afraid to push those people up as well. As you rise, try to rise as many ships as possible with you. One thing I will say on this point is, be careful who you choose to do this with. Some ships of some people will roll out the cannons and try to sink yours so only they remain at the top. Discerning who is real and really in your corner is huge. If you focus on message, action, and consistency, it’s not difficult to tell who these people are and who to have or keep in your corner if you give it time. Last point here, when someone shows you who they are, believe them until they show you different. Nothing beats working hard to get where you are only to have bad people use you to get ahead or to step on you to get there and then try to shoot you down while you’re up. It will happen. Just remember you can choose not to be dog eat dog even if you’re in the doghouse. Try to stay out of the mud even if people try to pull you there.

I’m a farm kid from rural Yorktown VA who drove a truck. I’m still that. I just commoditized myself and that history. The makeup washes off. The principles don’t. Pull the chain. Do the work. Be real. Help people. There are legacys to be built and everyones building one. Make yours count.

I oversaw private equity-backed passenger fleets. After 25 years in the property and passenger transportation industry, behind the wheel, in the broker’s chair, in the fleet executive’s office, and on the witness stand, reconstructing wrecks, this is the event you never want to happen. When a bus plows into stopped traffic at a work zone and kills a family, the first thing the cable networks reach for is the driver. The driver matters, but he is the last link in a chain built long before he ever turned the key. So let’s pull the chain.

What happened

Around 2:35 a.m. Friday, May 29, an E&P Travel motorcoach running the overnight New York City–to–Charlotte route came up on slowing traffic at a work zone on southbound I-95 in Stafford County, Virginia, near mile marker 146 by the Garrisonville exit. According to the Virginia State Police, the bus failed to slow. It struck a Chevrolet Suburban, which was shoved into an Acura SUV, which caught fire. Five people died. Four of them, a 45-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman, a 13-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, were from one family from Greenfield, Massachusetts. The fifth was a 25-year-old woman from Worcester. The bus was carrying 34 passengers. Forty-four people went to the hospital, three of them critical. The NTSB sent a go-team. The driver, identified by state police as 48-year-old Jing S. Dong of Staten Island, was injured, and charges are pending.

That’s the news. Now on to the wilder parts.

They did this before. Almost exactly this.

This was not E&P Travel’s first work zone.

On August 23, 2024, an E&P Travel bus was running up I-85 near Lexington, North Carolina, when it came up on a traffic-control vehicle performing a moving lane closure. North Carolina State Highway Patrol records show the bus failed to slow down and rear-ended the vehicle ahead. Nine people were hurt.

Failed to slow for a lane closure. Failed to slow for a work zone. Rear-end into slowing traffic. Same carrier, same fundamental failure mode, twenty-one months apart. In crash reconstruction, we call that a “repeat causation pattern,” and in a courtroom, it’s called notice, the company knew, or should have known, that it had a problem with drivers not managing speed and following distance into stopped traffic, and the documented record says nothing changed.

The Lexington wreck is a public record. That’s an NCDMV/State Highway Patrol crash report (DMV-349), and you can buy it through the state’s crash-report portal. Pull the narrative, the contributing-circumstance codes, the vehicle and driver block, and the diagram. I want to know whether the driver in Lexington is the same person who was behind the wheel on Friday.

“Satisfactory.” Seven weeks ago.

On April 3, 2026, 56 days before this crash, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration completed a compliance review of E&P Travel and rated the carrier Satisfactory. A full compliance review, the deepest look the agency takes, and the carrier walked out the door with the government’s gold star still warm in its pocket. My guess is that this was a state partner agency, but we don’t know.

To translate “satisfactory” for folks who don’t live under 49 CFR. It does not mean the buses are safe. It means that when an investigator went through the paperwork, hours-of-service logs, driver qualification files, the drug-and-alcohol program, and maintenance records, the agency didn’t find enough documented, provable noncompliance to drop the hammer. It is a record grade. A carrier can keep a beautiful binder and still put a fatigued driver in a coach with worn brakes on a 600-mile overnight. The rating measures the binder. It measures a small sample. On this carrier, the two were already pointing in opposite directions, because by April, the company had a 2024 injury crash on its federal record and a driver out-of-service rate of 33.3%, meaning one of every three drivers FMCSA inspected at roadside was bad enough to be pulled out of service on the spot, against a national average of 6.67%. Five times the norm. Federal records also show three speeding citations against E&P drivers in the prior 24 months, two in Delaware and one in Pennsylvania.

A satisfactory carrier with a five-times-national driver OOS rate and a repeat work-zone rear-ender is exactly the kind of paper-clean, road-dirty operation our oversight system is worst at catching. That’s not a hot take. That’s the design flaw.

Buried in MAP-21, in the piece Congress titled the Motorcoach Enhanced Safety Act of 2012, is a command to FMCSA in plain English. Under 49 U.S.C. 31144(i), the agency must assign a safety fitness rating to every for-hire interstate passenger carrier, and for any bus company that registered after MAP-21 passed, it has to do it within two years of that company getting its authority. Then it has to reassess that rating, in the words of the statute, not less frequently than once every three years. Carriers running heavy passenger loads in urban markets are supposed to be reviewed every year. This is the law, and it was written specifically because buses carry people.

For a bus line, Congress set a hard clock, and it runs straight through E&P Travel. The company was incorporated in November 2023 and picked up its authority shortly after, which put its first mandatory federal safety rating due, by statute, no later than roughly the turn of 2026. And what sits on the federal record? A compliance review closed Satisfactory on April 3, 2026, right at the ragged edge of that two-year deadline, seven weeks before five people died.

That same 2012 law told FMCSA to build a clear, passenger-facing rating system, so a family buying a seat could compare one bus line against another the way you compare a restaurant’s health grade. FMCSA proposed that rule in 2016 and then pulled it in 2017. The simple, comparable rating the law demanded was never built. So the every-three-years mandate sits on the books while the agency still runs the old satisfactory-conditional-unsatisfactory model from the compliance-review era, the same model that just blessed E&P.

The “headquarters” is a two-bedroom apartment

E&P Travel’s address of record, on the MCS-150 and everywhere else, is 612 Charles St, Apt 89, Kings Mountain, NC 28086. That address is a unit in Mountainview Townhomes, listed elsewhere as Pine Manor Apartments, a 100-unit, two-story budget apartment complex about 30 miles west of Charlotte, where units rent for between $625 and $1,000 a month. The company contact email is ep.travel89@gmail.com. The “89” is the apartment number.

This is an interstate motorcoach carrier that, per its own most recent filing, runs four buses, employs eleven drivers, and put 471,399 miles on the road in 2025. Its national headquarters is a rented two-bedroom apartment unit with no terminal, no yard, no maintenance bay, no place to so much as park a 45-foot coach. The buses don’t operate out of Kings Mountain in any real sense; the route that crashed on Friday originated in New York City with a driver who lives on Staten Island. Kings Mountain is a mailbox.

I’m not going to pretend I haven’t seen this movie a hundred times. A North Carolina registration of convenience, a Gmail address, an apartment for an HQ, real operations in the New York metro, drivers pulled from the curbside intercity network, this is the structural fingerprint of the low-cost, loosely-affiliated “Chinatown bus” model that DOT has been chasing since the 2008 motorcoach crashes that killed forty-one people and prompted the federal Motorcoach Safety Action Plan. The model isn’t illegal, but it’s built for thin margins and thin accountability, and thin accountability is what’s lying in five caskets this weekend.

Who actually owns this thing?

The name on the federal file as the company official is Joyce Gao. According to the North Carolina Secretary of State, E&P Travel, Inc. was incorporated on November 24, 2023, by Shuo Liu, who is also listed as the registered agent.

The $5 million problem, and why those families are already short

Now on to why I keep beating my insurance drum.

Federal law sets a minimum amount of liability insurance that a carrier must carry. For a motorcoach, any passenger vehicle with a seating capacity of 16 or more, the floor is $5 million, under 49 CFR 387.9. For a smaller passenger van, 15 seats or fewer, it’s $1.5 million. Compare that to a general-freight trucker hauling property, who only has to carry $750,000. So yes, the system already recognizes that a bus full of human beings is a bigger liability than a trailer full of cardboard, and it priced that difference at roughly 6.7-to-1.

Here’s the rot: that $5 million passenger floor took effect January 1, 1985, and it has never been raised. Not once. Not for inflation, not for medical-cost inflation, not for forty years of jury verdicts. The $750,000 property floor goes back to the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and has likewise never moved. In 2012, Congress passed MAP-21 and specifically ordered FMCSA to study whether these minimums were still adequate. FMCSA studied it, opened a rulemaking in 2014, delivered the required report to Congress, and then, in 2017, quietly withdrew the rulemaking and left the 1985 number exactly where it was.

Do the math the way an adjuster does. Five million 1985 dollars, adjusted for inflation, is somewhere around $15 million today. So the floor has lost roughly two-thirds of its real value while it sat there. We’re not even talking about a normal claim. We’re talking about five wrongful-death claims, two of them children, plus thirty-four injured, three critical. A mass-casualty motorcoach event like this generates exposure that runs into the tens of millions, easily $50 million or more before you’re done. Against a federally-mandated floor that may be as little as $5 million, sitting behind a four-bus carrier headquartered in an apartment.

You see the gap. The families from Greenfield and Worcester are going to discover what every catastrophic truck- and bus-crash family discovers: the federal “minimum” was set when gas was a dollar a gallon, and the people who could raise it decided, on purpose, not to. That’s the policy story, and it’s bigger than E&P Travel. E&P is just the latest carrier to drive a forty-year-old loophole straight into a work zone.

Who’s behind the policy, and what their book looks like

Every catastrophic motorcoach claim eventually runs into one wall: the insurance behind it. According to FMCSA insurance filings, E&P Travel’s liability coverage sits with Integon Indemnity Corporation. That name is worth a second look on its own, because Integon built its reputation in non-standard personal auto, not 45-foot coaches hauling 34 people overnight up I-95. The policy limit is the whole ballgame for these families, and a carrier riding the bare federal $5 million floor is a very different story than one carrying real excess coverage.

As for the book Integon is carrying, the numbers are big, but big needs a denominator. Across 7,706 carrier relationships, both historical and active, the book records 6,560 crashes (187 fatal), and 3,896 injuries. Spread across thousands of carriers over the years, that nets out to 0.85 crashes per carrier, and our own platform scores the insurer a 3.2 on a 100-point scale, squarely in the low-risk band. So this is not a rogue insurer. It is a large, ordinary commercial book that happens to include 243 carriers our model flags as high-risk, and now at least one that just killed five people. That is the honest version. Anybody who tells you the raw crash count alone proves the insurer is reckless is selling you something.

Five people are dead because a bus didn’t slow down for a work zone, for the second documented time. The driver will answer for Friday, as he should, but the carrier behind him was wearing the government’s “satisfactory” badge, running out of an apartment, with a known prior, against an insurance floor frozen in the Reagan administration. All of it was a choice somebody made, somewhere up the chain. Pull the chain.

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States told every freight broker in America that the federal preemption defense is over. Nine justices. Zero dissents. Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, decided May 14, 2026, held that a negligent hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. The safety exception saves it. States retain authority to regulate motor vehicle safety, and requiring a broker to use ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. Justice Barrett wrote it in eight pages. The freight brokerage industry spent nearly a decade and millions in legal fees building a fortress out of F4A preemption. The Supreme Court knocked it down a month earlier than expected.

Shawn Montgomery lost his leg in Illinois in 2017 when a Caribe Transport truck slammed into his parked vehicle. C.H. Robinson brokered the load. Caribe had a conditional safety rating and a driver who had been previously cited for careless driving. Montgomery sued. C.H. Robinson said federal law blocked it. The Seventh Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court reversed. Unanimously.

That’s the legal framework. So, what comes next? This ruling does not just open the door to broker liability. It opens the door to something much bigger. It opens the door to asking what the broker knew, what the shipper knew, and what both of them should have known about the carrier they selected to haul their freight and ultimately put on the road. The data to answer those questions is available at the national scale.

The case that proves the point

On April 15, 2023, a Gold Coast Logistics truck hauling Ghost Energy drinks for Anheuser-Busch killed Brandon Rogers on Interstate 10 in Beaumont, Texas. Seventeen people were hurt or killed. The driver, Leandre Sime, was operating under a Florida temporary commercial driver’s license. He is under criminal indictment. The broker was ArcherHub, a Colorado-incorporated company whose actual dispatching workforce of more than 200 people operates from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. ArcherHub was covering a fallen load. The original carrier dropped off. ArcherHub scrambled to fill the gap. A Gold Coast truck showed up.

Gold Coast, formerly DMG Consulting and Development Inc. under DOT Number 2190975, was owned and operated by Dragos Sprinceana, a Romanian immigrant who ran 350 power units out of Elgin, Illinois, and now spends most of his time at Mar-a-lago. Sole officer. Sole director. Sole shareholder. No board. No compliance committee. No VP of Safety. Just Dragos. His old Gold Coast COO actually runs the same equipment under a new company, Pony Express. Shocking.

Gold Coast trucks were involved in 150 crashes, 10 fatalities, and 86 injuries in FMCSA roadway crash records. The Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission adds at least seven more injuries that never appeared in a federal database, including two workers injured four days apart in April 2022 who both filed emergency death and permanent total disability petitions. The company’s federal enforcement history is the single worst in the currently analyzed FMCSA enforcement dataset. I will get to those numbers in a moment.

The formal federal revocation of Gold Coast’s operating authority did not come until August 27, 2023, 134 days after Brandon Rogers died. On April 15, Gold Coast technically retained active authority despite having incurred one of the largest civil penalties in history, totaling nearly $ 900,000 across two enforcement cases in about a year’s time. So, with a record like that, even if he somehow kept his authority, who would broker him freight? The answer is a lot of people.

Active authority is not a safety qualification

The right question, and the question Montgomery v. Caribe Transport now makes fully litigable in every state courthouse in America, is what ArcherHub’s carrier file on DOT 2190975 showed when the dispatching decision was made, and whether any reasonable carrier qualification standard would have approved that truck for an Anheuser-Busch load given what was already publicly documented on that date.

Tea Technologies platform enforcement analysis of 11,946 closed FMCSA enforcement cases with recorded settlement amounts identified Gold Coast’s first enforcement case, IL-2021-0097-US1688, closed May 17, 2022, with a settled amount of $791,640, as the single largest settled FMCSA enforcement case in the entire dataset. National rank: number one. One hundredth percentile. The violations included 49 CFR 383.37(a), knowingly allowing drivers to operate without valid CDLs, and 395.3(a)(3)(i), hours of service violations. That case closed less than 11 months before the Beaumont crash. It was public. It was in SAFER. It was sitting right there for anyone who looked.

A second enforcement case, IL-2023-0120-US1713, closed October 19, 2023, after the crash, added another $97,990 in settled penalties for violations, including for using a driver who had tested positive for controlled substances. Combined federal enforcement total across both cases: $889,630. Carrier-level cumulative enforcement ranking across 11,307 motor carriers with enforcement history: number one. The single highest cumulative settled enforcement exposure in the dataset.

FMCSA civil penalty settlements are commonly negotiated downward from the original proposed penalty. The original proposed penalty exposure on that $791,640 case was almost certainly higher. We have a FOIA request pending to find out how much higher. The fact that the settled amount alone ranked first nationally tells you something about the scale of what FMCSA found inside that operation.

That is what was publicly available before the crash. Not after. Before. The question is not whether Gold Coast had a license. The question is whether anyone in the chain from Anheuser-Busch to ArcherHub to the dispatching desk in Chisinau pulled up the FMCSA profile and read what it said. Montgomery v. Caribe Transport says you can now ask that question under oath.

Scoring the shipper by the carriers it hires

This is where the work we have been doing becomes directly relevant to what Montgomery just made possible.

FMCSA roadside inspection records include shipper information. When a truck gets pulled into a weigh station or stopped on the shoulder, the inspector records the carrier, the driver, the vehicle, and, in many cases, the shipper identified on the electronic bill of lading. That means we can work backward from inspection records to build a dataset of carriers associated with a specific shipper’s freight movements. Not the shipper’s complete procurement roster. Not every load they have ever tendered. But a federally documented, inspection-derived view of which carriers were actually pulling that shipper’s product on the road.

We did exactly that for Anheuser-Busch.

The dataset contains 2,366 unique DOT-numbered carriers appearing in FMCSA inspection documentation, for which Anheuser-Busch was identified as the shipper. Those carriers collectively show 4,619 total crashes in the 24-month reporting window, including 1,510 injury crashes, 111 fatal crashes, and 126 recorded fatalities. The weighted vehicle out-of-service rate across 5,456 inspections is 17.08 percent. The weighted driver out-of-service rate is 6.54 percent. The dataset includes 7 Conditional-rated carriers, 325 Satisfactory-rated carriers, and 2,034 carriers with no safety rating. That last number is the one that should scare you, because ‘unrated’ does not mean safe. It means FMCSA has not gotten around to looking yet.

We ranked every carrier in the dataset using a composite score based on fatal crashes, fatality count, injury crashes, total crashes, crash rate per power unit, vehicle out-of-service rate, driver out-of-service rate, safety rating severity, prior revocation indicators, authority transfer indicators, and BASIC alert flags. The model is designed to put the worst public safety performers at the top. It is a triage tool, not a legal conclusion. But it tells you something when you sort 2,366 carriers by safety performance and the names at the top include carriers with 60-plus crashes, 50 percent vehicle OOS rates, driver OOS rates over 100 percent on small inspection samples, and fatal crash histories that would disqualify them from any professionally run supply chain.

Thirty-two carriers in the Anheuser-Busch shipper dataset were assigned to the critical risk tier. Five hundred seventy-eight scored at the high-risk tier. Eighty-four carriers showed at least one fatal crash. Four carriers showed prior revocation indicators. Five showed authority-transfer signals consistent with purchased or transferred operating authority rather than with organically built companies.

This is the caliber of the carrier pool touching one of the most recognizable consumer brands on the planet.

Why this matters after Montgomery

Before May 14, 2026, a freight broker could point to F4A preemption and argue that carrier selection decisions were shielded from state tort liability. That argument worked in the Seventh Circuit. It worked in the Eleventh Circuit. It kept C.H. Robinson out of the Montgomery case for years. It kept dozens of other brokers out of dozens of other cases.

That shield is gone.

What replaces it is a factual inquiry into what the broker knew, what the broker should have known, and whether the broker exercised ordinary care in selecting the carrier. Justice Barrett wrote that requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring, wrote that if brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, they have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers. Kavanaugh also cautioned that the ruling should not be read to mean that brokers will routinely be subject to state tort liability following truck accidents. He is right about that. The ruling does not create automatic liability. It enables asking the question.

The question is no longer just about the carrier on the crash load. The question is about the pattern. What carriers does this broker habitually select? What carriers does this shipper habitually approve? What does the historical carrier selection profile look like across hundreds or thousands of loads? Is there a pattern of selecting carriers with elevated crash histories, OOS rates, enforcement exposure, authority-age problems, or chameleon-carrier indicators? If there is, was the carrier on the crash load an outlier, or was it consistent with the way the broker or shipper has always done business?

That is the question the Anheuser-Busch carrier dataset answers. That is the question Tea Technology’s shipper and broker scoring methodology is built to answer. That is the question that every plaintiff’s attorney reading Montgomery will start asking in discovery within weeks.

How we build the score

Tea Technology’s Highway Intelligence platform ingests FMCSA carrier data across authority, insurance, inspection, crash, enforcement, and compliance datasets. We score individual carriers on a 0 to 100 scale using crashes, out-of-service rates, violations, revocations, authority age, and insurer quality. That carrier-level score has been the backbone of the platform since launch.

The shipper and broker scoring layer works differently. Instead of scoring the entity directly, we score it based on the carriers it touches. If a shipper’s freight repeatedly appears on trucks operated by carriers with elevated crash histories, high OOS rates, enforcement exposure, prior revocations, or authority transfer signals, that pattern produces a shipper risk profile. The same logic applies to brokers. If a broker’s load history shows a pattern of dispatching carriers with poor safety profiles, that pattern is now discoverable, scorable, and, after Montgomery, litigable.

We are not guessing about carrier quality. We are measuring it against the same federal data that FMCSA uses to rate carriers, the same data that is publicly available in SAFER, and the same data that any broker or shipper with a carrier qualification process is supposed to review before they put a truck on the road. The difference is that we are aggregating it, ranking it, and presenting it in a format that makes the pattern visible instead of buried across 780,000 individual carrier profiles.

The Beaumont crash in context

Jennifer Rogers is raising three children without their father. Brandon Rogers died on April 15, 2023, at the wrong moment on the wrong highway. The truck that killed him was owned by a carrier whose federal enforcement record was the single worst in the national enforcement dataset. The broker that dispatched it was operating from a 200-person office in Moldova. The shipper whose product was on the truck is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. The driver held a temporary CDL and is now under criminal indictment. The carrier’s owner, Dragos Sprinceana, was photographed at Mar-a-Lago while owing nearly a million dollars in unpaid federal safety fines and named a dead man as the company’s registered agent under penalties of perjury.

Brian Beckcom of VB Attorneys in Houston has 17 plaintiffs in Jefferson County, Texas. The Montgomery ruling was handed down six days ago. The preemption defense that would have shielded the broker from a negligent selection claim in many circuits is no longer available. The data to prove what the broker and shipper should have known about Gold Coast is public, documented, and now scored.

The anatomy of a broker and shipper liability case is not complicated. A carrier with a publicly visible, measurable safety profile is selected to haul freight. Someone gets killed. The question is whether the people who selected that carrier exercised ordinary care. Montgomery says you can ask that question. The data shows that, in many cases, the answer is no.

What comes next

The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent hiring suits will be filed within weeks. Plaintiff’s attorneys who have been sitting on broker liability claims waiting for the circuit split to resolve now have a unanimous Supreme Court opinion clearing the path. The insurance market has not yet priced this exposure. When it does, freight broker premiums will adjust. The adjustment will be severe for brokers who cannot demonstrate a documented, data-driven carrier selection process. It will be less severe for brokers who can show that their vetting methodology is systematic, repeatable, and grounded in publicly available safety data.

The carriers a broker habitually selects, their safety profiles, their authority ages, their crash histories, their inspection outcomes, all of that is now part of the risk profile that an underwriter will evaluate. The carriers that a shipper’s freight repeatedly appears on are now part of the shipper’s risk profile too.

For the freight industry, this is the moment when carrier selection stops being a back-office function and becomes a boardroom liability question. The data exists. The legal framework exists. The only thing that was missing was the ability to ask the question in court. Montgomery supplied that.

The trucks are still rolling. The question is: who is on them, and who put them there?

Since the Supreme Court handed down Montgomery v. Caribe Transport on May 14, I have not been able to get through a phone call, a deposition prep, or a LinkedIn thread without somebody asking me the same question. What makes a carrier safe? If we cannot just lean on FMCSA’s SAFER snapshot anymore, what is the objective standard? Where is the line?

These are the wrong questions, and I want to spend some time here explaining why, and then walking through the questions we should be asking instead. Consider this a primer. A 101 because the industry has been operating on a definition of carrier vetting that was never actually correct, and after Montgomery, the cost of that mistake just went up for everyone in the chain.

Here is the quick refresher on what the Court did, because the rest of this depends on it. The justices ruled 9 to 0. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito. The plaintiff, Shawn Montgomery, lost part of his leg in 2017 when a Caribe Transport truck struck his parked tractor-trailer on an Illinois shoulder. C.H. Robinson brokered that load. The carrier, Caribe, carried a conditional safety rating at the time. The Court held that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act does not preempt a negligent selection claim against the broker, because the statute’s safety exception saves it. For roughly a decade, brokers leaned on FAAAA preemption to get these cases dismissed before discovery ever started. That shield is gone.

The principle the Court announced is that exercising ordinary care when you select a carrier concerns motor vehicle safety. That logic reaches shippers who pick carriers directly. It reaches third-party logistics providers. It reaches digital freight platforms. Anybody in the chain who selects a carrier and who has access to the public safety data is now exposed.

Three words that are not synonyms

Here is the first thing I want to fix, because almost every conversation I have about this runs aground on it. Safe, compliant, and risky are three different words, yet the industry uses them as if they mean the same thing. They don’t.

Compliant means a carrier meets the minimum standard the federal government will accept before it lets that carrier keep its operating authority. Compliance is a floor. It is pass-or-fail, and the bar is set low on purpose because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations are a national minimum, not a best practice. When a carrier is compliant, what you actually know is that on the day somebody checked, that carrier was not so far out of line that the government would pull its authority. That is it. That is the whole guarantee.

Safe describes an operational outcome. Did the truck get from point A to point B without hurting anyone or damaging the freight? Safe is a track record. It is backward-looking and mostly a function of things hard to see from the outside: driver behavior, equipment condition, dispatch pressure, fatigue, and the weather that day.

Risk is the one VERY FEW define because for most, it’s not what they do, yet it is the one that matters. Risk is exposure. Risk is the amount of financial and human damage a carrier is capable of causing, the likelihood it will cause it, and who pays when it does. Risk is forward-looking. It is probabilistic. Critically, it includes an entire category of factors that have nothing to do with safety or compliance.

Here’s what people miss. A carrier can be compliant and unsafe. A carrier can be safe and out of compliance on paper. And a carrier can be both safe and compliant and still be a genuinely bad risk. After Montgomery, when that carrier causes a catastrophic crash, safe-and-compliant is not the shield people think it is, because the plaintiff’s lawyer is not going to argue compliance. He is going to argue risk, and he is going to argue that you could have seen it coming.

Risk 101: frequency and severity

If you have ever sat across the table from an underwriter, you already know how they think, even if they never said it out loud. Risk has two axes. Frequency and severity. How often something bad happens, and how bad it is when it does.

Frequency multiplied by severity gives you expected loss. That is the actuarial spine of every commercial auto premium ever written. An underwriter is not really asking if this carrier is safe. The underwriter is asking, over the policy period, how many losses am I likely to see, how big are they likely to be, and what is the tail? The tail is the rare, catastrophic, company-ending event. The multi-fatality crash. The hazmat release. The nuclear verdict. This is why insurance has multiple risk layers, especially in captive groups.

There is no line item for safety rating. There is no field for compliant, yes or no. Those things might correlate loosely with frequency. They tell you almost nothing about severity, and severity is where companies die.

There is one more distinction worth keeping straight, because it is the difference between the people who do this for a living and the people who think a SAFER printout is due diligence. A hazard is a source of potential harm. Risk is the probability that the hazard will actually cause harm, multiplied by the severity of that harm. Exposure is how much of your value, or your client’s value, is standing in front of that risk when it goes off. When an insurer retains me to assess a fleet, I am not grading the fleet’s character. I am estimating frequency, estimating severity, and pricing exposure. That is the lens. Carrier vetting, done correctly, is the exact same lens applied to a hiring decision rather than a policy.

The FMCSA data trap

So let’s talk about the data the whole industry actually leans on, and what it does and does not tell you.

FMCSA assigns exactly three safety ratings, and only after an on-site compliance review. Satisfactory means the carrier had functional safety management controls on the day of the audit. Conditional means the auditors found those controls inadequate. Unsatisfactory means the carrier is unfit and must stop operating within a short window. That is the entire scale.

Roughly 92 percent of carriers have no rating at all. They are Unrated. Out of something like 780,000 motor carriers in this country, the overwhelming majority have never had an auditor walk through the door. FMCSA has never had the investigators rate them all, and it does not now.

So when a broker or a shipper pulls up a carrier and the rating field says Unrated, that does not mean safe. It means nobody from the federal government has looked. Some unrated carriers are small, disciplined, well-run operations that have simply never come up in the audit lottery. Others are problems waiting to be discovered. From the rating alone, you cannot tell which is which, and that is the trap. The absence of a bad rating gets read as a good rating. It is not one. Unrated is not a clean bill of health. It is an empty file.

Satisfactory has its own problem: time. A satisfactory rating can be six, eight, or ten years old. It reflects the carrier that existed on audit day. Fleets turn over. Owners sell. Safety directors leave the program behind. A satisfactory rating from 2017 tells you about a company that may no longer exist, and the rating field will not tell you how old it is unless you look.

Conditional is the rating that actually carries weight, and it carries it in the wrong direction. A conditional rating indicates that the FMCSA has already found serious deficiencies. If you hire a conditional carrier and it is involved in a crash, you are going to be explaining to a jury why you chose a carrier that the federal government had formally flagged. That was the exact fact pattern in Montgomery. Caribe carried a conditional rating. That is not a coincidence in this case. That is the case.

Conditional ratings cost money even when nothing goes wrong. Carriers with a conditional rating typically see commercial insurance premiums run 15 to 40 percent higher, are excluded from many shipper- and broker-approved lists, and lose access to most government freight. The market already prices conditional as a risk. It just does not have a clean way to price everything that the rating leaves out.

That is the core problem with leaning on SAFER as your vetting standard. It is a thin, lagging, mostly empty dataset that was never built to measure exposure. It was built to help FMCSA triage which carriers to investigate with limited resources. The industry borrowed it as a hiring tool because it was free and readily available. Free and there is not the same as adequate.

The 360-degree view and what actually goes into a risk profile

If FMCSA data is a thin slice, what is the whole picture? What does a real 360-degree carrier risk profile actually include?

This is the question I set out to answer when we built Tea Technologies and the CarrierVerifi platform. We did not build it the way you build a compliance checker. We built it the way I think an insurer or a litigator would when they retain me to assess a fleet, because that is the actual job, and the job has very little to do with checking boxes. This is the platform FMCSA special investigators use today.

Start with financial health. We integrated SEC EDGAR for publicly held carriers and their parent companies because a carrier’s balance sheet is a non-FMCSA leading indicator of risk that is not reflected in safety regs. A carrier under financial stress makes predictable choices. It defers maintenance. It stretches trade cycles on tractors and trailers past where they should. It cancels the telematics subscription. It lets the safety director position sit empty for a year. None of that shows up as a violation until after it shows up as a crash. The money is upstream of the safety data.

Then culture. We pulled in OSHA inspection and violation history, because how a company runs its shop, its dock and its yard tells you how it runs everything else. A carrier that cuts corners on a machine guard or a fall hazard in the shop is telling you something true about how it thinks about risk on the road. Culture is the single largest driver of loss, and there is no FMCSA field for it anywhere.

Then the corporate structure. We tied in OpenCorporates, because who a carrier is connected to changes the risk picture completely. Shared officers. Shared addresses. Shared phone numbers. A pattern of authorities opened and closed. This is how you surface a chameleon carrier, an operation that lets a bad authority die and reincarnates clean under a fresh DOT number. In a safety snapshot, a chameleon looks brand-new and therefore harmless. In a corporate tie analysis, it looks like exactly what it is.

Then, the litigation history. We tied in federal court records, because a carrier’s litigation footprint is one of the loudest risk signals there is, and almost nobody looks at it before tendering a load. If a carrier has 350 trucks, five years of operating history, and a couple of hundred federal cases spanning wrongful death, personal injury, employment claims and civil rights complaints, no BASIC score is going to tell you what those dockets tell you. Litigation is the system already scoring the carrier’s risk for you. You just have to go read it. If you hire that carrier, these federal litigation cases are the cases you could now be exposed to.

Then catastrophic exposure. We added PHMSA incident data across all available history, because a hazardous materials release is the textbook tail risk. Low frequency, brutal severity, and very capable of ending a company and pulling its broker and shipper into the claim.

We even brought in U.S. Census data, because regional and demographic context, local crash rates and the economic conditions where a carrier is domiciled and runs its lanes, move real-world exposure whether the industry likes it or not.

That is more than 30 integrations now, and almost none of it is compliance data. Most of it is not safety data. It is risk data. It is the material that does not appear in a SAFER snapshot and that still decides outcomes anyway. The reason most carrier vetting does not look like this is not that the data is hidden. It is public. The reason is that very few people in this industry have actually sat in the loss control chair. There are a lot of compliance people. There are a lot of safety people. There are very few fleet risk professionals trained to look at the entire board at once.

How to actually vet, qualify and screen a carrier

All right. Here is the part that earns the 101 in the title. If safety ratings are not the standard, what is the actual process? How do you vet, qualify and screen a carrier so that the decision holds up, both on the road and later in a deposition?

Think about it in three phases. What you do before you ever tender a load. What you do to make the process itself defensible? And what you do after, because vetting is not a one-time event.

Phase one is the pre-tender screen, and it has more layers than most operations actually run.

Authority and identity come first. Confirm the carrier actually holds active operating authority for the type of freight you are moving, and confirm it through live FMCSA data, not a number somebody emailed you and not a stale record in your own system. This is also where you catch double-brokering and identity theft, which are no longer edge cases. Verify that the carrier you are talking to is the carrier on the authority. Match the MC and DOT numbers, the legal name, the phone number and the email domain. A carrier calling from a free email account that does not match the registered entity is a flag, not a formality.

Authority age is next, and it is one of the most useful and most ignored signals there is. A carrier with operating authority less than 12 to 18 months old is a new entrant. New entrants are not automatically bad, but they are statistically higher risk; they have not yet undergone their new-entrant safety audit, and the post-Montgomery trade coverage specifically named authority under 18 months as one of the markers plaintiff attorneys are building case files around. Brand-new authority is also the calling card of the chameleon carrier. New authority is not disqualifying. It is a reason to look harder, not a reason to look away.

Insurance is where a lot of vetting is technically done and substantively useless. Pulling a certificate of insurance is not verification. The certificate has to be current, the coverage limits have to actually fit the load and the exposure, and the smart move is to get that certificate directly from the insurance agent rather than from the carrier, because a certificate is a document and documents can be edited. Confirm the policy is genuinely in force, not lapsed and not pending cancellation. Require yourself as an additional insured and a waiver of subrogation where appropriate. And understand the limits problem in plain terms. The federal minimum for most general freight is still 750,000 dollars in auto liability, a number set decades ago that would not come close to covering a single serious injury today, let alone a fatality. A carrier carrying only the federal minimum is not adequately covered. It is legally compliant and financially exposed, and after Montgomery, that exposure flows straight up the chain to whoever selected it.

Safety performance comes next, and this is where you read the FMCSA data correctly instead of superstitiously. Look at the safety rating, but date it and discount it accordingly. Look at the BASIC percentiles in the Safety Measurement System, but read them in context. A high Unsafe Driving or Hours of Service percentile is a different and more serious problem than a high percentile in a paperwork-heavy category, and percentiles have to be read against the size of the carrier and the number of inspections it has had. Look at the crash history, and do not just count crashes. Weight them. A fatal is not a tow-away. Look at preventability where it is available. Look at the out-of-service rates for both drivers and vehicles against the national averages, because OOS rates are one of the better near-real-time behavioral signals FMCSA gives you for free.

Then go past FMCSA entirely, which is the whole point of the 360 view. Pull the financial picture if the carrier has one. Run the corporate-tie analysis to surface chameleon patterns and connected entities. Pull the federal litigation footprint. Check PHMSA to see if there are any hazmat dimensions at all. This is exactly the work CarrierVerifi was built to consolidate, because doing it by hand across a dozen separate public systems for every carrier you touch is not realistic, and not realistic is not a defense a jury is going to accept anymore.

Phase two is making the process itself defensible, and this is the part Montgomery changed most directly.

Have a written carrier vetting standard operating procedure. Put it on paper. Define the minimum criteria. Define what raises a flag. Define who is allowed to override a flag and what they must document when they do. Then follow it the same way every single time. The reason this matters is not bureaucratic. In discovery, the first thing a plaintiff’s attorney is going to request is your carrier vetting policy and the file on the carrier that crashed. If you have a written SOP and a documented file showing you followed it, you have a defense. If you have no SOP, that absence is itself evidence. An undocumented process and a nonexistent process look identical from the outside, and a jury will treat them the same. Vet consistently, and write down that you did it.

Phase three is continuous monitoring, because a carrier’s risk profile is not a photograph. It is a film. The carrier you vetted in January can have a lapsed insurance policy, three new crashes and a downgraded rating by June. So track certificate-of-insurance expirations and set a hard rule: do not tender to a carrier whose coverage has gone inactive. Monitor the carrier’s FMCSA Safety Measurement System data on a recurring basis, and flag movement, not just absolute scores. A carrier whose violation trend is climbing is a materially different risk than the same carrier with the same scores trending down, and the trajectory is something almost no vetting process ever looks at. This is the logic behind the monthly FMCSA monitoring we built into TruckSafe Risk Control’s process. You are trying to catch deterioration while it is still a data point, before it becomes a claim, and well before it becomes a verdict.

Put it in the contract. A master transportation agreement should include a hold-harmless and indemnification structure, an insurance and additional-insured requirement, a clear delegation of cargo securement responsibility, and an explicit prohibition on re-brokering the load without your written consent. The no-re-brokering clause matters more than people think, because the moment your vetted carrier quietly hands the load to an unvetted one, every bit of diligence you did is worthless, and you may not even know it happened until the crash report names a carrier you have never heard of.

The driver layer: where the floor is not the standard

Everything above is carrier-level. There is a driver-level version of the same problem, and it follows the exact same pattern. Compliance sets a floor, and the floor is not where risk lives.

Take the motor vehicle record. To be compliant, a carrier pulls a driver’s MVR at hire and once a year after that. FMCSA says that is enough. Is it enough for you? It is not. A once-a-year MVR means a driver can pick up a serious violation, a suspension, even a DUI in February, and the carrier does not find out until the following January, if it finds out at all. There are continuous license monitoring services, SambaSafety and other providers, that watch the record every day and alert the carrier the moment something changes. That is not a compliance requirement. It is a risk control. The questionnaire we use in our assessments asks specifically whether a carrier runs continuous license monitoring and, just as importantly, whether it acts on the alerts within 24 hours, because a monitoring service nobody reads is theater.

Take the Pre-Employment Screening Program. Pulling a PSP report is not required. But PSP shows a driver’s actual roadside inspection and crash history across previous employers. A carrier that does not run PSP is choosing not to see information that is sitting right there for the asking. In litigation, choosing not to look is its own kind of finding.

Take the road test. To be compliant, a carrier can decide that a valid CDL is proof enough and skip the behind-the-wheel road test entirely. Then there is a crash. And the question in front of the jury becomes this. Did you really decide that ten minutes’ ride to confirm that this person could actually operate this truck was too much to ask before you put him next to my client’s family? That is the question. That is the hole. It has nothing to do with whether a box was checked and everything to do with risk.

Take the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse. Compliance is running the query. Risk control is what you do with a hit: how fast your designated employer representative reports it, whether you have a real return-to-duty process, and whether your random testing pool is genuinely maintained as drivers come and go. The gap between the minimum and the defensible standard is, once again, the entire point.

What a real 360 assessment actually asks

When TruckSafe Risk Control runs a risk control assessment on a fleet, it is not a compliance review, and the difference shows up immediately in the questions. We use a structured risk control questionnaire that runs roughly 120 questions, and a large share of them have nothing to do with whether a driver can physically operate a commercial vehicle. They are not safety questions. They are not compliance questions. They are risk questions. I want to give real examples because they make the distinction concrete.

In the governance section, we ask whether annual risk-reduction goals are built on leading indicators, things like BASIC percentiles, out-of-service rates and claims frequency, rather than lagging ones. We ask whether, at a multi-terminal carrier, loss costs are charged back to the local profit-and-loss statement, because a terminal manager who never feels the cost of a claim will not manage to prevent it. We ask whether safety budgets are approved and tracked at the executive level, and whether supervisors are evaluated on safety metrics in their annual reviews. None of that is in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. All of it predicts loss, because it tells you whether safety is a line item with a budget and an owner, or a poster on a wall.

In the vendor and contracted-transport section, we ask whether the carrier has a written carrier and broker vetting SOP of its own, whether it tracks certificate-of-insurance expirations and blocks a tender when coverage lapses, whether its owner-operator lease actually specifies maintenance, equipment age, insurance and driver criteria, and whether subcontractor pay is tied in any way to safety performance. That last one tends to surprise people. It is a question about how a company spends its money, and it is one of the better predictors of how seriously it takes supply chain risk.

In the emergency response section, we ask whether the carrier has a crisis-management and media plan for a high-profile crash, whether each vehicle has an accident kit with a camera, and whether incident investigations are conducted within 24 hours using a real root-cause methodology. The first 24 hours after a catastrophic crash largely determine the litigation trajectory, and a carrier that has never thought that through is telling you something important about itself.

In the claims and continuous-improvement section, we ask whether quarterly loss-trend reports actually drive new safety initiatives, whether there is an annual management review of the carrier’s own risk score and action plan, and whether the policy manual has a maintained revision history. A revision history sounds like a clerical detail. It is not. It is the difference between a living program and a binder somebody bought once and never opened again.

Then we do the thing that turns it from a survey into an assessment. We make the carrier upload its actual policies, the specific ones, not a table of contents. If a policy does not exist, that absence is a finding. Then we weigh the carrier’s answers against its FMCSA history, because the federal record tells us whether the carrier is actually managing the program it just described or simply knows the right answers to give. A carrier can tell you it has a robust fatigue management program. Its Hours of Service violation history will tell us whether that is true. Then we layer in the claims and loss-run history, because if the losses do not match the program, the program is fiction. We are cross-referencing what the fleet says against what the federal record and the loss data show, and the contradictions are where the real risk profile lives.

That is what a 360-degree view actually means. It is not more compliance. It is a different question entirely, asked with the data to check the answers.

The litigation reality

I have referenced the courtroom a few times, so let me put real numbers on why this is real.

A nuclear verdict, in the shorthand the insurance and trucking world uses, is a jury award of over $ 10 million. According to the American Transportation Research Institute, the median nuclear verdict reached roughly 36 million dollars in 2022, about 50 percent higher than a decade earlier, and mean verdict awards have been climbing at better than 50 percent a year, far outpacing both general inflation and healthcare costs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, reviewing truck-crash settlements and verdicts over a recent three-year period, found average awards in the range of $ 27 million. Verdicts over $ 50 million are a growing share of the total each year.

The mechanism behind many of those numbers is what defense lawyers call the reptilian theory. The plaintiff’s attorney does not really try to prove the accident. He tries the company’s character. He is not in that courtroom to prove the driver was three miles an hour over the limit. He is there to convince the jury that the company is an ongoing danger to that juror’s own family and community, and that the only responsible response is a verdict large enough to send a message. The way you build that narrative is by finding holes. The road test that was skipped. The MVR that was pulled once and filed. The carrier that was sourced because a screen said Satisfactory. Reptile theory runs on the gap between the minimum a defendant met and the standard a reasonable person would expect, and the wider that gap, the bigger the number.

The environment for it keeps getting more hostile. Swiss Re’s research found that 76 percent of U.S. consumers now believe jury awards are too low, and among adults under 40, that figure climbs to 83 percent. Those are the people filling jury boxes. ATRI has also tracked third-party litigation funding, in which outside investors bankroll these suits in exchange for a share of the award, which has grown several hundred percent in just a few years. That funding removes the financial pressure that previously pushed plaintiffs toward an early, smaller settlement.

Here is what Montgomery added to it all. Before May 14, in most of the country, the broker had a strong shot at getting out of the case early on preemption grounds, and the verdict, if it came, would have landed on the carrier. After May 14, the negligent selection claim against the broker survives, the broker undergoes full discovery, and the verdict can be apportioned among the carrier, the broker, and, by the same legal logic, the shipper. A 40 million dollar verdict is one conversation when it is a single defendant. It is a very different conversation when the plaintiff’s lawyer gets to stand in front of the jury and ask who chose this carrier, and the answer points at three companies instead of one.

The insurance problem…limits, exclusions and the fine print

There is a piece of this that almost nobody puts into a carrier or broker risk profile, and it may be the most expensive omission of all. Insurance itself.

Start with a fact that surprises people outside the industry. Freight brokers are not federally required to carry liability insurance. None. A broker is required to have a $ 75,000 surety bond, the BMC-84, and it is worth understanding what that bond is actually for. It exists to ensure carriers and shippers are paid when a broker fails to pay them. It is a payment guarantee. It is not liability protection, and it will not put a single dollar toward a wrongful-death verdict. Kavanaugh flagged exactly this gap in his Montgomery concurrence. Carriers face a federal insurance mandate. Brokers do not, and a 75,000 dollar bond is not liability insurance.

The large brokers carry real coverage. They have buildings, infrastructure, balance sheets, and assets that a plaintiff can actually reach. But the large brokers are not all brokers. A very large share of the brokerage world is mom-and-pop, single-member LLC, pass-through operations with no office, no assets and no liability policy at all. Montgomery made those brokers liable. It did not make them collectible, nor did it give them anything to stand behind. A broker with no coverage and no assets who gets named in a catastrophic case is personally and operationally exposed with nothing between them and the verdict. And when the named defendant has nothing, the exposure does not evaporate. It travels. It lands on whoever else in the chain does have coverage and assets, which increasingly means the shipper.

Now move up to the companies that do carry insurance, because having a policy is not the same as being protected, and this is where risk professionals earn their fee. Two things go wrong. The first is limits. Catastrophic verdicts routinely land in excess of policy limits, and the dollars above the limit do not disappear. Somebody absorbs them. The second, and quieter, one is language. Policies are written documents, and the exclusions, exemptions, sublimits and definitions buried inside them decide what you actually recover, or whether you are actually protected, long after the loss has happened.

I will give you a real one. I worked on a cargo loss involving a piece of oilfield equipment worth about 1.5 million dollars, being moved on an open-deck flatbed carrier. A third-party driver took a turn, the load came off the deck, and the equipment was destroyed. There was a cargo policy in place with a one-million-dollar limit, and on paper, that looked like adequate coverage for the loss. It was not. The policy carried specific exclusions and limitations for open-deck cargo, and open-deck damage of this kind was sublimited to 150,000 dollars. One hundred fifty thousand, against a 1.5 million dollar loss. The shipper, whose equipment it was, absorbed the rest. Nobody read the open-deck language until the claim was already filed.

This is the part the industry treats as somebody else’s problem. Brokers and shippers will tell you they carry contingent auto and contingent cargo coverage, and most of the better ones do. But contingent policies are some of the most heavily conditioned products in commercial insurance. They are layered with triggers, exclusions and definitional language that can keep you from recovering when the freight is yours, or keep you from being protected when you are the named insured. A contingent policy that nobody has ever read closely is one you are guessing about.

So insurance belongs in a risk profile, but not as a yes-or-no field. Whether a carrier, a broker or a shipper carries coverage is the easy question. The real questions are what the limits are against the realistic severity of a loss, and what the language does when a claim is actually filed. That is true of the insurance policy. It applies to the master transportation agreement and the carrier contract. And it is true of the company’s own internal policy manual.

Look at what happened to Werner. The verdict against Werner Enterprises ran near $ 100 million, and it was eventually reversed by the Texas Supreme Court, but only after seven years and a great deal of money spent getting there. Here is the part worth sitting with. That verdict did not come from a compliance failure. Werner was compliant. The case against the company was built on direct-negligence theories, on how it trained and supervised, on the decision to route a trainee, on how its own internal policies and operational guidelines were written and how a plaintiff’s lawyer could characterize them in front of a jury. Compliance did not create that exposure, and compliance could not have closed it. Language did. The wording of policies, contracts and internal documents is risk, and it is risk that lives entirely outside the compliance conversation.

That is why insurers and underwriters retain people like us. Reading a fleet’s loss runs, its policy language, its contracts and its internal policies for the holes, the exclusions and the exposures is a specific discipline. It is fleet risk work. It is what we do for the people who actually make decisions on insurance and litigation, and not a single line of it appears on a SAFER snapshot.

Subcontracting blind spot

There is one more blind spot I want to name, because it is the one that costs people who genuinely believed they did everything right.

I am writing this the same morning I am speaking at a military surface transportation event at Christopher Newport University here in Newport News, and this exact issue is on the agenda. When an organization, a shipper, a broker, or the government contracts a carrier to move a load, it tends to vet that prime carrier and stop. But the prime carrier’s own safety record can be spotless precisely because the prime never touches the freight. It brokers it, or subcontracts it, or hands it down a chain. The real exposure is not the carrier you vetted. It is the carrier you never saw, the one the prime handed it to, and whether the prime even has a subcontracting policy worth the paper it is printed on.

You can vet the prime perfectly and still own the risk of a subcontractor you did not know existed. That is why the no-re-brokering clause, and the question of whether a carrier has a real vendor selection program of its own, are not paperwork details. They are the difference between a vetting decision that holds and one with a hole in the middle, which nobody finds until the crash report comes back with an unfamiliar name on it.

What makes a carrier safe?

This is the wrong question. Not because safety does not matter, it matters enormously, but because safe is a backward-looking outcome, compliant is a minimum floor, and neither one tells you what you actually need to know before you put a carrier on the road with your name attached to the load. The question that does the work is this. What is this carrier’s risk profile? How much exposure does it carry to the motoring public, to its insurer, and now, after Montgomery, to the broker and the shipper who selected it? The companion question, the one a deposition will eventually ask you directly, whether you prepared for it or not: how good is my own process for vetting, qualifying and screening carriers, and would it survive an afternoon of cross-examination?

Carrier vetting for risk exposure is not a SAFER printout. It is a written standard that you follow consistently every time. It is a pre-tender screen that reads FMCSA data correctly and then goes well past it, into financial health, corporate ties, litigation history and catastrophic exposure. It is continuous monitoring instead of a one-time photograph. It is real contract language with a re-brokering prohibition that has teeth. It is reading insurance limits against the realistic severity of a loss, and reading the policy, contract and internal-policy language for the exclusions before a claim finds them for you. It is a driver-level program that treats the federal minimum as a starting line, not a finish line. It is the basic discipline of writing down what you did, because an undocumented good decision and no decision at all look exactly alike to a jury.

I get to be on television and write columns, and I value that but the day job underneath it is this; I am an expert witness in commercial motor vehicle litigation and a loss and risk control advisor to insurers, underwriters and the attorneys who try these cases. Those are the people who taught me, a long time ago, that risk, not safety and not compliance, is where this whole thing actually lives. Tea Technologies, CarrierVerifi and TruckSafe Risk Control exist because that is the work, and because doing it by hand, carrier by carrier, across a dozen separate public databases, is not something a human being can keep up with anymore.

Safe isn’t always exposure-free or risk-free. Compliant isn’t always safe. What “safety” means doesn’t matter and risk is the only one of the three that decides who pays.

On the night of May 14, 1988, a church youth group from the First Assembly of God in Radcliff, Kentucky, was coming home from a day at Kings Island. Sixty-three kids and four adults on a retired 1976 school bus built on a Ford chassis, rolling south on I-71 through Carroll County. Some of them were asleep. It was about 11 o’clock at night.

Larry Mahoney was driving a 1987 Toyota pickup truck north in the southbound lanes on a curved stretch of that same highway. His blood alcohol concentration was 0.24. That was twice the legal limit in Kentucky in 1988, which was 0.10. It is three times the current national limit of 0.08. He had been arrested for DUI before.

Mahoney took the church bus almost head-on with a fair offset to the right front. The impact was violent but survivable. The NTSB investigation later confirmed that the bus driver, John Pearman, a part-time associate pastor and local court clerk, responded reasonably. He saw the headlights. He tried to steer left to avoid the collision. The NTSB concluded he was limited by the darkness and road curvature but that his response was appropriate.

Nobody on that bus died from the impact of the crash.

The collision ruptured the bus’s fuel tank, which was mounted outside the frame rails behind the right front wheel. There was no protective cage. No crush zone. The 60-gallon gasoline tank split open and the fuel ignited immediately. The bus had two exits. The main entrance door at the front was jammed shut by the collision and a single emergency exit at the rear. That was it. Two doors for 67 people.

Survivors described crawling over seat backs and climbing over other passengers, trying to reach the rear exit. The two rear bench seats encroached on the door space, leaving an opening of 12 to 15 inches. A body jam formed at the back door. Passengers who could not reach the rear in time were overcome by smoke and fire. The interior temperature reached 2,000 degrees. The seat coverings were not fire-retardant. They burned.

Twenty-four children and three adults died. All from the fire. All because they could not get out of a bus that met every applicable federal safety standard on the books at the time of its manufacture.

The terrible irony is that if John Pearman had driven straight into Mahoney’s pickup instead of steering left to avoid it, the outcome would almost certainly have been better. A head-on into a Toyota pickup would have been absorbed by the mass of a loaded bus chassis. The offset impact is what ruptured the fuel tank. The evasive maneuver that any reasonable driver would have attempted is what created the geometry that killed 27 people.

The NTSB investigation, published in 1989 as report HAR-89/01, did not simply blame Larry Mahoney. It indicated the bus. The report found that the unprotected fuel tank, the flammable interior materials, and the inadequate emergency exits were design failures that turned a survivable collision into a mass casualty fire. The bus was legal. The bus was also a death trap. Those two facts, coexisting in the same vehicle, are why Carrollton changed the regulatory landscape.

The NTSB made recommendations to three groups: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the 50 states, and church organizations that operated former school buses.

NHTSA was directed to revise three Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. FMVSS 217, governing school bus emergency egress, was revised to require that exit capacity be based on vehicle occupant count rather than arbitrary door placement. FMVSS 301, governing fuel system integrity, was revised to require protective caging around fuel tanks to prevent rupture on impact. School buses built after the revision have fuel tanks encased in steel cages integrated into the frame. FMVSS 302, governing flammability of interior materials, was revised to require fire-retardant seat coverings and flooring. The seat material that burned at 2,000 degrees and killed 27 people inside a bus that survived the crash itself was replaced with materials designed to resist ignition and slow flame spread.

Kentucky moved faster than the federal government. The state now requires all school buses to have 9 emergency exits: front and rear doors, a side door, 4 emergency windows, and 2 roof hatches. That is more emergency exits than any other state or federal standard requires. The bus at Carrollton had two.

Kentucky enacted stricter DUI laws in 1991 and toughened them further in subsequent years, including provisions for looking back into the criminal histories of repeat DUI offenders. Larry Mahoney had a prior DUI arrest. The system that should have kept him off the road failed to do so.

The NTSB recommended that all 50 states propose legislation to phase out pre-1977 school buses, which were built before the April 1977 FMVSS revisions that had already improved exit requirements and structural standards. In 1988, 22.3 percent of all school buses in operation nationally were pre-1977 vehicles. By 1997, that number had dropped to 2.94 percent. The Carrollton bus was a 1977 model year vehicle built to pre-April 1977 standards. A bus manufactured one month later would have had more exits.

The NTSB also identified a critical regulatory gap between school buses in active school service and the same vehicles after they were retired from school use but continued to carry passengers. The Carrollton bus was a retired school bus used as a church activity bus. Had it been built new in March 1977 specifically for non-school use, the applicable federal standards at that time would have required more emergency exits than were required for school buses. The loophole was that a bus built to school bus standards could be retired from school service, transferred to a church or private organization, and continue operating with fewer exits than a non-school bus of the same era would have required. The 27 people who died at Carrollton died in that regulatory gap.

Several families of victims sued Ford Motor Company and Sheller-Globe, the body manufacturer. They argued the bus was defectively designed. The litigation lasted years and resulted in substantial settlements. More importantly, it forced manufacturers to fundamentally rethink how they built school buses.

Karolyn Nunnallee, whose 10-year-old daughter Patricia was the youngest victim, became the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Janey Fair, another victim’s mother, became MADD’s national vice president. The Carrollton families did not just grieve. They organized. MADD had been working since 1980 to combat drunk driving. The Carrollton crash served as a galvanizing event that accelerated the national push toward the 0.08 BAC standard, which eventually became federal law.

Larry Mahoney was convicted on 27 counts of second-degree manslaughter, 16 counts of second-degree assault, 27 counts of first-degree wanton endangerment, and one count of driving under the influence. He was sentenced to 16 years. He served approximately 10 years before being released in September 1999.

The reforms that came out of Carrollton were real and they saved lives. School buses today are not the bus that burned on I-71. The fuel tanks are caged. The seats are fire-retardant. The exits are multiplied. The structural integrity standards are dramatically higher. School buses are statistically among the safest modes of transportation in the country. NHTSA data shows that of the 343,391 fatal motor vehicle crashes between 2013 and 2022, only 0.28 percent involved school buses. A child is safer on a school bus than in a passenger car, walking, or riding a bicycle.

That does not mean the job is finished.

Between 2013 and 2022, there were 976 fatal school bus crashes in the United States, resulting in 1,082 deaths. That is an average of approximately 108 people killed in school bus crashes every year. In 2024, the most recent year with complete data, 110 people died in school bus-related crashes. In 2023, it was 128. The numbers have been declining gradually over the decade, which is a positive trend attributable to improved safety standards and technology. But 108 people a year, every year, for a decade, is not a solved problem.

The distribution of those deaths is critical and often misunderstood. Of all people killed in school bus-related crashes between 2015 and 2024, approximately 71 percent were occupants of other vehicles, not the school bus. Fifteen percent were pedestrians. Six percent were school bus passengers. Four percent were school bus drivers. Three percent were cyclists. The school bus itself is protecting its occupants at a remarkably high rate. The people dying are overwhelmingly outside the bus, struck by or in collision with the bus, or hit by other vehicles in the crash sequence.

Among school bus occupants killed between 2013 and 2022, 61 were passengers and 50 were bus drivers. That is 111 school bus occupants killed in a decade, out of a system that transports approximately 26 million children to and from school every day on 483,000 buses. The per-trip fatality rate is extraordinarily low. But those 111 people were real. Those 61 passengers were children.

Pedestrian deaths are a persistent and specific problem. NHTSA found that there were 1.5 times more fatalities among pedestrians than among school bus occupants in school-transportation-related crashes between 2014 and 2023. The highest concentration of school-age pedestrian fatalities occurred between 3:00 and 3:59 PM, the afternoon dismissal window. The loading and unloading zone, the moment when children are most exposed to traffic, remains the most dangerous part of the school bus transportation system. The Kansas Department of Education’s national loading and unloading survey for the 2021-2022 school year documented four fatalities caused by school buses and two caused by other vehicles during loading and unloading operations.

Carrollton changed fuel tanks, exits, seat materials, and DUI laws. It did not put seatbelts on school buses. Thirty-eight years later, most states still do not require them.

School buses over 10,000 pounds, which is the vast majority of full-size school buses, rely on a passive restraint system called compartmentalization. The seats are high-backed, closely spaced, heavily padded, and designed to absorb energy in a frontal or rear collision by containing the passenger within the seat compartment. NHTSA has historically taken the position that compartmentalization provides adequate protection for passengers on large school buses and has not mandated lap-shoulder belts at the federal level for vehicles over 10,000 pounds. Federal law requires lap-shoulder belts on small school buses weighing less than 10,000 pounds.

Compartmentalization works well in frontal and rear impacts. It does not work as well in rollovers, side impacts, and ejection scenarios. Test lab footage and real-world crash footage show passengers being thrown from compartmentalized seats during rollover events. In a 2020 crash between a school bus and a service utility truck in Tennessee, the bus driver and a 7-year-old passenger were killed. The NTSB investigation led to a renewed recommendation in 2022 calling for states to require lap-shoulder belts on all school buses.

NTSB Board Member Michael Graham addressed this topic directly at the 2025 NASDPTS conference. “It is hard to believe we are still having a discussion about the safety benefits of seat belts, and their proper usage, on any roadway vehicle, let alone a school bus. The safety data could not be clearer: school buses equipped with lap and shoulder belts, combined with proper usage of the belts, provide maximum protection for all occupants.”

As of 2026, only eight states require seatbelts on large school buses in some form: Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. The requirements vary significantly. Some mandate three-point lap-shoulder belts. Some require only lap belts. Some apply only to buses manufactured after a certain date. Some leave enforcement and usage policy to local school districts. Louisiana’s law lacks the appropriate funding necessary for enforcement.

Texas is the most recent state to act. Senate Bill 546, signed by Governor Abbott in June 2025, requires all school buses in the state to be equipped with three-point lap-shoulder belts by September 1, 2029. The law was a direct response to a fatal 2024 crash in Hays County involving a school bus and a cement truck that killed two people, including a pre-kindergarten student. The NTSB investigation of that crash highlighted the need for passenger restraints.

The cost argument is the primary resistance. NTSB estimates that adding lap-shoulder belts costs between $7,000 and $10,300 per bus. Installing belts requires thicker seats with fewer rows, reducing passenger capacity. For school districts already operating on strained budgets with aging fleets, the cost is not trivial. Several Texas districts have described SB 546 as an unfunded mandate and are planning to retrofit during future replacement cycles rather than retrofitting existing buses immediately.

The counterargument from districts that have implemented belts is instructive. Rutherford County Schools in North Carolina has been phasing in lap-shoulder belts since 2017 at no extra charge from the manufacturer, with over half the fleet now equipped. Drivers reported improved student behavior, better discipline, and higher job satisfaction. Austin ISD has had belts on all buses since 2012. The practical experience from districts that have adopted belts contradicts much of the resistance from districts that have not.

Blue Bird, one of the largest school bus manufacturers in the country, now includes three-point belts as standard equipment. The industry is moving. The question is how fast.

The lesson of Carrollton is not that drunk driving kills. Everyone already knew that. The lesson is that a vehicle can meet every federal safety standard on the books and still be fundamentally unsafe. The 1976 Ford church bus was legal. It had two exits because that was all the law required. Its fuel tank was unprotected because no regulation required a cage. Its seats burned because no standard required fire-retardant materials. Twenty-seven people died in the gap between what the law required and what the physics of a crash demanded.

That gap is what Carrollton should have taught the industry to close permanently. In some areas, it did. Fuel tanks are caged. Exits are multiplied. Interior materials resist fire. Those specific lessons were learned. But the broader principle, that regulatory minimums are not the same thing as safety, and that waiting for a mass casualty event to close the gap between the two is an unconscionable way to make transportation policy, is a principle the industry has not fully internalized.

The seatbelt debate is Carrollton’s unfinished business. The data is clear. The NTSB has been making the same recommendation since the 1990s. The cost is real but it is finite. The risk of a rollover event on a bus full of unrestrained children is not hypothetical. It has happened. Children have been ejected. Children have died. The compartmentalization system that was adequate in 1977 is not adequate in 2026, not because it does not work in the scenarios it was designed for, but because it does not cover all the scenarios that school buses actually encounter on real roads.

In 1988, a bus full of children burned because the law allowed a 60-gallon unprotected gasoline tank and two exits on a vehicle carrying 67 people. It took 27 dead children to change that. In 2026, 483,000 school buses carry 26 million children every day, with no federal requirement for passenger restraints on large buses, and only eight states requiring them in any form. NTSB has been asking for this change for decades. The question is whether we wait for another Carrollton-scale event to force it, or whether we learn from the one we already had.

John Pearman did everything right. He saw the headlights. He reacted. He tried to save his passengers. Twenty-seven of them died anyway because the bus they were in was legal and inadequate at the same time.

The kids riding school buses tomorrow morning deserve better than a regulatory framework that waits for a catastrophe to fix what the data already shows is broken. Carrollton taught us that 38 years ago. We are still learning.

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC. It was unanimous. Nine to zero. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurrence with Justice Samuel Alito, saying the case was closer than the majority might suggest, and then joined anyway.

The holding fits on a napkin. A negligent-hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. The FAAAA’s safety exception, 49 U.S.C. Section 14501(c)(2)(A), saves it. States retain authority to regulate safety “with respect to motor vehicles.” Requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. End of analysis. Eight pages. No dissent.

Shawn Montgomery, the driver who lost his leg when a Mack Truck hauling plastic pots through Illinois veered off course and hit his tractor-trailer, can now pursue his negligent-hiring claim against C.H. Robinson. The freight brokerage industry’s federal preemption defense, the legal shield that brokers had relied on since the Seventh Circuit decided Ye v. GlobalTranz in 2023, is gone.

I have been writing about this case for months. I covered the oral arguments on March 4. I wrote about the circuit split between the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. I laid out the shipper and broker liability exposure before the opinion dropped. None of what Barrett wrote surprised me. The only thing that surprised me was how fast the court moved and how little disagreement there was.

What I want to talk about now is not what the opinion says. I covered that for FreightWaves the day it came down. What I want to talk about is what happens next, who pays for it, and why the people celebrating this decision and the people panicking about it are both missing the point.

Barrett’s opinion is clean and narrow. The FAAAA preempts state laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a broker. But the safety exception preserves “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” Barrett asked one question: Does a negligent-hiring claim against a broker concern motor vehicles? She used dictionary definitions and the court’s prior construction in Dan’s City Used Cars v. Pelkey. “With respect to” means “concerns.” A motor vehicle is a vehicle used on a highway for transportation. Requiring a broker to exercise care in selecting a carrier concerns the trucks that will transport the goods.

C.H. Robinson raised three counterarguments. Barrett rejected all three. The safety exception does not swallow the preemption clause because plenty of state laws related to prices, routes, and services have nothing to do with safety. The surplusage argument fails because the overlap comes from the word “safety,” not from the breadth of “with respect to.” And the subsection (b) anomaly, the fact that Congress included a safety exception in subsection (c) but not in subsection (b), produced what may be the most quotable line Barrett has ever written: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”

Kavanaugh’s concurrence is the one the industry should actually read. He was honest about the competing considerations. He acknowledged two points in the brokers’ favor. First, the FAAAA mandates minimum insurance for carriers but not for brokers, which suggests Congress did not anticipate tort suits against brokers. Second, the subsection (b) problem creates an anomaly where state tort suits are permitted for interstate but preempted for intrastate, which is “exactly backward” from federalism principles.

Then Kavanaugh explained why those points do not carry the day. The FAA Authorization Act was an economic deregulation statute, not a safety deregulation statute. Congress left tort suits against carriers fully intact. There is no meaningful federal safety regulation of brokers’ carrier selection practices. FMCSA requires brokers to select a federally registered carrier but does not impose safety standards on how they make that selection. If Congress preempted state tort law and simultaneously failed to impose federal safety requirements on broker selection, brokers would operate in “a black hole with no meaningful safety-related regulation.”

Kavanaugh was not willing to read that result into an economic deregulation statute.

Then he wrote the paragraph that matters most. Truck safety is a matter of life and death. In 2022, approximately 500,000 reported truck accidents resulted in about 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries. Not all can be prevented. But some can. Some carriers are known to be less safe. Some truck drivers are known to be unfit. If brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, they have “a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers.”

That is the entire theory of the case. The liability exposure is the point.

The only federal financial responsibility requirement for a freight broker in the United States is a $75,000 surety bond filed under 49 CFR 387.307. That bond does not cover tort liability. It does not respond to a personal injury judgment. It does not pay out when a jury decides that a broker was negligent in selecting a carrier whose truck killed someone. It exists for one purpose: to ensure that motor carriers and shippers get paid when a broker defaults on freight payment obligations. Contracts. Agreements. Arrangements. Payment obligations. That is it.

There is no federal requirement for a freight broker to carry bodily injury liability insurance. Not a dollar. Not a penny. Nothing.

FMCSA tightened enforcement of the bond requirement with a final rule that took full effect January 16, 2026. The reforms closed loopholes in BMC-85 trust funds, eliminated junk assets, required surety providers to notify the FMCSA within 2 business days of a drawdown below $75,000, and authorized immediate suspension of authority if the bond is not replenished within 7 days. Those were good and necessary reforms. They protect carriers from getting burned by brokers who default on payments. They do absolutely nothing to protect the public from the consequences of a broker’s negligent selection of a carrier.

Some brokers voluntarily carry contingent auto liability and contingent cargo insurance. I did when I brokered freight. It was a business decision, not a regulatory requirement. Contingent auto is the policy that responds when a carrier’s own insurance is exhausted or disputed and the broker faces a claim arising from the carrier’s operations. It is exactly the policy a broker needs post-Montgomery. It has never been mandatory. The sophisticated brokers carry it. A lot of brokers do not.

Post-Montgomery, both categories are equally exposed to state tort law. The difference is that one has insurance that responds and the other is defending a $36 million claim with a $75,000 bond that was not designed for tort liability. The numbers are staggering and they are getting worse.

ATRI’s updated trucking litigation analysis, published in late 2025, found that truck-tractor tort case filings grew at an average annual rate of 3.7 percent between 2014 and 2023. The median nuclear verdict, jury awards exceeding $10 million, reached $36 million in 2022. That is 50 percent higher than the median in 2013. The share of verdicts exceeding $50 million jumped 6.4 percentage points. The average trucking verdict between 2020 and 2023 was $27.5 million.

Thermonuclear verdicts, awards exceeding $100 million, are no longer rare. In 2024, a St. Louis jury awarded $462 million against Wabash National in a fatal underride crash, including $450 million in punitive damages. In 2021, a Florida jury returned a $1 billion verdict in a fatal crash. In 2018, a Texas jury hit Werner Enterprises with $90 million in a case where the truck driver was not even cited by responding officers.

In more than 80 percent of verdicts exceeding $1 million, non-medical damages, such as pain and suffering, were up to 10 times higher than the actual medical bills. The plaintiff’s bar has turned trucking litigation into a specialized arena. The reptile theory puts the carrier’s entire safety record on trial to inflame jurors. Third-party litigation funding removes the financial pressure on plaintiffs to settle early, because investors bankrolling lawsuits want to maximize payouts. Swiss Re’s 2025 study found that 76 percent of American consumers now believe jury damage awards are too low. Among adults under 40, it is 83 percent. The jury pools are getting more hostile, not less.

California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana are consistently identified as nuclear verdict hotspots. ATRI found that state courts produce significantly higher awards than federal courts. For cases above $1 million, the median award was $3.6 million in state court versus $2.5 million in federal court. The industry lost an estimated $102.8 million in 2022 alone in excess awards because eligible cases were not removed from state courts.

The federal minimum insurance requirement for interstate motor carriers hauling general freight is $750,000. Congress set that number in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. The regulation was finalized in 1985. It has not been adjusted in 45 years.

If $750,000 had tracked core inflation since 1985, it would be approximately $2.2 million today. Adjusted for medical cost inflation, roughly $3.7 million. FMCSA’s 2026 quadrennial filing shows that $750,000 now covers under 1.5 percent of the median nuclear verdict.

On April 9, 2026, Representatives García and Tran reintroduced the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, which would raise the carrier minimum to $5 million and index it to inflation going forward. This is the fourth time García has introduced this legislation. FMCSA has separately signaled it expects to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would raise the minimum to $2 million or more.

The carrier minimum debate has been going on for over a decade. The Trucking Alliance favors an increase. ATA has generally opposed it. The Trucking Alliance’s data shows that if all crash settlements were covered by a $750,000 limit, 42 percent of the monetary exposure would represent uninsured liability. That is the carrier side.

The broker side is worse. The carrier at least has $750,000 in mandatory liability coverage. The broker has zero.

Montgomery is a win for highway safety. It is a win for crash victims. It is a win for accountability. I do not argue with any of that. The principle that a broker who selects a carrier with a known dangerous safety record should face consequences for that decision is correct. Kavanaugh was right. The liability exposure is the incentive.

The downstream effects of this decision will not fall evenly across the trucking industry. They are going to land hardest on the people who can least afford it.

Large carriers will benefit from Montgomery. Werner, J.B. Hunt, Schneider, the asset-heavy fleets with documented safety records, internal compliance departments, dashcam programs, and telematics suites are exactly what a liability-conscious broker is now going to demand. A broker facing tort exposure for negligent carrier selection will gravitate toward carriers who can demonstrate, with verifiable data, that they are safe. That means large carriers with established safety profiles, visibility platforms, and insurance portfolios that can absorb a claim. Every post-Montgomery carrier vetting checklist will favor size, track record, and technological sophistication.

That is a competitive advantage for large carriers and it is a structural disadvantage for everyone else.

Small carriers and owner-operators, particularly those without their own customers and who rely on brokers and load boards for freight, are facing a market that just got harder. A broker who is now personally liable for their carrier selection is going to look at a one-truck operation with authority less than two years old, minimal inspection history, and no telematics platform and see risk. Not because that carrier is unsafe. Because the broker cannot prove that carrier is safe. The absence of data is the problem. A large carrier with 500 trucks and a decade of inspection history has a statistical safety profile. A new owner-operator with eight months of authority and four inspections does not have enough data to generate one.

The broker is not going to take the chance. Not when the alternative is booking a carrier whose safety record can be documented, verified, and presented to a jury three years from now.

This is the same dynamic that played out when CSA scores first became public in 2010. Carriers with elevated BASIC percentiles, even when the scores were statistically unreliable for small fleets, lost freight because brokers and shippers could see the numbers and did not want the exposure. The same thing will happen here, except now the exposure is not a compliance flag on a spreadsheet. It is a tort claim in state court.

Owner-operators who find their own freight, who have direct shipper relationships, who market themselves on safety and service and do not depend on brokers for load volume, will feel this less. They are not in the broker selection pool in the same way. Those who get squeezed are the operators who depend on the brokerage ecosystem for their livelihoods. That is a lot of trucks.

I know what it feels like to be a one-truck operator trying to build something. The guy who just got his authority, bought a truck, and is trying to build enough history to prove he is a professional is going to have a harder time getting loads from brokers who are now calculating their own tort exposure on every load tender.

The brokers are not wrong to do it. That is the problem. They are being rational. They are responding to a legal incentive that the Supreme Court just created. But the cost of that rational response falls on the small operators who did nothing wrong and who were not parties to the Montgomery case.

The insurance market will move quickly on this.

Contingent auto liability, which has been a voluntary niche product for sophisticated brokers, is about to become the most important coverage in the freight brokerage ecosystem. Underwriters will develop and scale products for the broker market. Brokers who can demonstrate documented, data-driven carrier vetting processes will get better rates. Brokers who cannot will pay more or get denied.

Carrier insurance premiums, which have already been climbing at 10 percent annually according to the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, will face additional upward pressure because brokers will now require higher carrier coverage as a condition of load tender. A broker facing tort exposure for carrier selection will demand that the carrier’s own insurance be adequate. Carriers with minimum coverage only may find themselves squeezed out of broker freight, just as carriers with elevated BASIC scores were.

The number of insurers serving the trucking industry is already shrinking. Werner’s chief legal officer said at ATA’s Management Conference in October that insurers are reducing the number of policies they are willing to write. Progressive’s commercial lines general manager said the commercial automotive industry has made money in only one of the past 10 years. Adding 28,000 freight brokers to the tort defendant pool is going to concentrate underwriting attention on an industry that is already struggling with capacity.

Congress should mandate minimum liability insurance for freight brokers. The surety bond serves its purpose for carrier payment protection. It was never designed for tort liability and it does not respond to it. A broker’s minimum matching whatever the carrier minimum becomes, whether that is $750,000, $2 million, or $5 million, would create parity between the party that operates the truck and the party that selected the operator. The brokers who already carry contingent auto would be in compliance. The brokers who do not would need to buy coverage or exit the market.

That sounds harsh. It is also what happens in every other industry where the intermediary who selects the contractor bears legal responsibility for the consequences of that selection. Construction general contractors carry liability insurance. Property management companies carry liability insurance. Staffing agencies carry liability insurance. Freight brokers have been the exception. Montgomery just eliminated the legal basis for that exception. The insurance requirement should follow.

Montgomery settled the preemption question. It did not settle the question of financial responsibility. The court said brokers can be sued. It did not say brokers are required to carry insurance that would pay the judgment.

The median nuclear verdict is $36 million. The carrier minimum is $750,000 and it has not moved since 1980. The broker insurance requirement is zero. The surety bond is $75,000 and it does not respond to tort claims. Somewhere in the gap between those numbers is the next crisis.

For the large carriers, this is a tailwind. Documented safety becomes a competitive moat. For the small carriers and owner-operators who rely on brokers for freight, this is a headwind they did not create and cannot control. For the brokers, the era of selecting carriers with no financial consequence for that decision is over.

I have said this before and I will keep saying it. If you pick the carrier, you own the choice. Document it. Defend it. Or answer for it. The Supreme Court made the decision; now the rest is up to Congress, the insurance market, and 28,000 brokers who need to decide what kind of operation they are running.

The Columbus corridor, billing Medicaid for fake home visits, is the same one running chameleon carrier trucking companies. One costs taxpayers money. The other costs people their lives. 195 active motor carriers clustered along a single stretch of road in northeast Columbus, Ohio, the same corridor recently exposed for billions in Medicaid fraud. One building alone houses 29 separate trucking companies. At least one entity registered with FMCSA appears to be a home health company.

Drive east on Dublin Granville Road in Columbus, Ohio and count to forty. In that time, you will pass a half dozen home health storefronts and a half dozen trucking companies. Sometimes they share a building. Sometimes they share a suite. In at least one case, they share a DOT number.

At The DailyWire, Just dropped a piece called “Medicaid Millionaires” that ripped the lid off what is happening in Ohio’s home health care economy. The short version is this. Ohio spent a billion dollars in 2024 paying people to go to other people’s houses and cook, clean, or just sit there and talk. The workers don’t need any healthcare credentials. Many of them are relatives of the person they are “caring” for. The services take place in private homes, where no one can verify whether anything actually happened. One windowless building on Busch Boulevard housed 94 companies that billed taxpayers $66 million.

We pulled federal motor carrier registration data for the Dublin Granville Road area and cross-referenced addresses, officials, and phone numbers across 195 active USDOT-registered carriers. What we found is a textbook example of the chameleon carrier infrastructure.

A single address, 2700 East Dublin Granville Road, currently hosts 29 active carriers. Twenty-nine separate trucking companies, each with its own DOT number, each with its own MC authority, each with its own insurance policy, all operating out of one commercial building with more than two dozen suite numbers.

The names sound like they were pulled out of a hat. Apex Logistics Group. Penguin Freight Inc., Fortress Logistics Inc., Zulem Express LLC. Smart Transport LLC. Quick Interstate Transport Inc. Each one was registered under a different person. Each one occupies a different suite. Suite 295. Suite 425. Suite LL03. Suite LL27. Unit 300P. Unit DD.

Some of those suites are lower-level units that, based on the building profile, might be nothing more than a mailbox in a hallway. 2700 East Dublin Granville is not an outlier. It is just the biggest cluster. Across a few miles of the same road, we found:

2021 E. Dublin Granville Rd, 9 carriers. 5900 Roche Drive, 9 carriers. 2151 E. Dublin Granville Rd, 5 carriers. 1933 E. Dublin Granville Rd, 4 carriers at the base address plus another 11 at various suite and unit numbers in the same building. Nineteen address clusters with two or more carriers. Six named officials are appearing on multiple carrier registrations. Every single one of the 195 entities is showing an active status.

At 1395 East Dublin Granville Road, Suite 222K, sits an entity called GIGM HOME HEALTH SERVICES LLC. It holds USDOT number 4286629. It is registered as a motor carrier with FMCSA. It is also, by its own name, a home health company. The exact type of entity billing Medicaid for homemaking and companionship services in the same zip code.

Same corridor. Same suite farm infrastructure. Same type of LLC. Two different federal agencies are writing checks, neither one talking to the other.

The business model Rosiak described for Medicaid is structurally identical to the chameleon carrier playbook. Register an LLC. Get the number you need, whether that is an NPI for Medicaid or a DOT for trucking. Bill until someone catches you. If they do, shut down, walk down the hall, and open a new one.

Chameleon carriers are networks of companies that constantly reincarnate. Revenue-focused operations designed to run a trucking company into the ground, make as much money as possible, and start over with a clean DOT number.

The 60 Minutes investigation focused on Super Ego Holding. Chameleon carriers connected to that network logged nearly 15,000 safety violations and 500 accidents in two years. Super Ego is the headline. Dublin Granville Road is the infrastructure.

When the FMCSA shuts down one carrier at 2700 E. Dublin Granville Suite 295, 28 others in the same building can absorb the freight, drivers, and equipment overnight. When a driver stacks up violations under one DOT number, there is a suite down the hall with a clean one. That is how chameleon operations work at the street level.

The February 2026 Indiana crash that killed multiple people traced back to a chameleon carrier network involving Sam Express, AJ Partners, and Tutash Express. Carriers tracked for months. Secretary Duffy wrote that “these interconnected carriers have all the markings of FRAUD.” FMCSA expanded the investigation. None of it brought the dead back.

The Medicaid fraud costs money. A lot of money. A billion dollars a year just in Ohio.

The trucking fraud costs money too, but it also costs lives.

Fatal crashes involving large trucks are up 52% since 2010. In 2022, 5,936 people died in crashes involving large trucks. Seventy percent of them were people in other vehicles. Families in minivans. Commuters in sedans. Federal investigators have found that reincarnated carriers are roughly three times more likely to be involved in serious crashes than legitimate new entrant carriers.

Every one of those crashes also feeds the nuclear verdict crisis. Eight and nine-figure jury awards in trucking fatality cases. Those verdicts jack up premiums for every legitimate carrier in America. The cost rolls downhill to shippers, then to consumers, and into the price of everything that moves by truck. Which is everything.

FMCSA has 350 investigators for 700,000 carriers. That is one investigator for every 2,000 companies. The agency’s registration system is 40 years old. Administrator Derek Barrs admitted that on camera. The new MOTUS system is rolling out in phases through 2026 with facial recognition and automated cross-referencing. That is progress but MOTUS alone will not fix what is happening at 2700 East Dublin Granville Road.

The same address clusters we mapped on Dublin Granville Road should be flagged automatically, not just in FMCSA’s database but across CMS, IRS records, state LLC filings, and

SAM.gov

exclusion lists. An address hosting 29 trucking companies and a home health company should trigger scrutiny from every federal agency writing checks to entities registered there.

Right now, none of that happens. CMS does not talk to FMCSA. FMCSA does not talk to the IRS. State LLC filings are a black hole and the people running these operations know it.

Six officials in our data appear on multiple carrier registrations. Mohamed Osman shows up on carriers at two different addresses. Khalid Ibrahim appears on two carriers at two different addresses. Hashim Moalim appears on two carriers at two different addresses. These are investigative leads that a functioning regulatory system would catch on its own. The fact that it does not is the point.

The Medicaid fraud and the chameleon carrier fraud are not two different problems in two different industries that happen to share a zip code. They are the same fraud economy running two revenue streams through the same suite farm infrastructure, exploiting the same regulatory blind spots, in the same buildings, on the same road, in the same city.

One of those frauds costs taxpayers money. The other one costs people their lives. Both of them are still operating on East Dublin Granville Road right now.

No single piece of this explains how we got here. It is all of it together. The freight that does not pay enough to attract qualified carriers. The brokers who screen by checking three boxes. The bonds that run out by claimant 23. The carriers who cycle identities and keep rolling. The data that exists is public and gets ignored. A Supreme Court case awaits a decision that will determine whether moving freight through the cheapest available carrier on a load board carries any accountability at all when someone dies.

Start with a man in Tennessee. He runs one truck. Has been running it for 12 years. He found a load on DAT from a broker he had not used before. The rate confirmation looked legitimate. The load paid what he needed it to pay. He picked it up, ran it through the cleaning process, delivered on time, received a signed proof of delivery, and submitted his invoice.

Thirty days later, nothing. Forty-five days, still nothing. The calls went to voicemail. The emails bounced back. He checked SAFER and found out the broker’s operating authority had been revoked two weeks after he delivered. He filed a claim against the $75,000 surety bond because that is what the bond is intended to cover. He was claimant number 47. The bond was already exhausted. He received a $312 check.

That is what the freight broker financial responsibility system produced for a 12-year professional who delivered on time and documented everything. Three hundred and twelve dollars.

That story actually begins much earlier, with a freight economy that has been systematically rewarding the cheapest possible transaction for a decade and an industry structure that converted almost every accountability mechanism into a checkbox. To understand where we are, you have to trace the full chain, from the consumer buying cheap goods and expecting free delivery, to the broker sourcing the cheapest possible carrier for the freight, to the carrier that can only afford to haul at that rate because it has compressed every cost including safety, to the bond that runs out at claimant 23, to the Supreme Court case awaiting a decision that will tell us whether anyone in the middle of that chain has to answer for what happens when the truck crashes.

The structural cause of cheap freight is not a mystery. GLP-1 medications, Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and the growing class of appetite-suppressing drugs have now penetrated more than 16 percent of American households. KPMG estimated that users cut caloric intake by 21 percent and reduced monthly grocery spending by 31 percent, a projected $48 billion annual reduction in food and beverage spending through 2034. The CoreLogic analysis and DAT reefer data have tracked the resulting freight impact, potentially totaling 450,000 fewer truckloads per year at current penetration rates. Del Monte Foods declared bankruptcy in 2025, citing a 4 to 5 percent decline in packaged food demand. The food freight that has always been the backbone of refrigerated truckload volume is compressing in ways that are structural and accelerating, not cyclical.

At the same time, a decade of ultra-cheap imported goods conditioned millions of American consumers to expect products to cost almost nothing and to ship for free. Large retailers with enormous logistics leverage drove shipping costs as close to zero as possible at the consumer-facing level, suppressing the market signal that tells the supply chain that moving freight over long distances costs real money. When that signal is suppressed at the consumer level, it is suppressed everywhere downstream. Shippers negotiate accordingly. Brokers find carriers accordingly. Carriers bid accordingly.

The SONAR Outbound Tender Volume Index and the extended contract rate compression documented in FreightWaves data throughout 2023 and 2024 tell the quantitative story. Carriers were receiving spot rates in nominal terms roughly equivalent to 2014 peak rates, while ATRI data shows operating costs had risen approximately 34 percent since 2014. The industry lost tens of thousands of carriers in 2023 and 2024, according to FMCSA authority data. The survivors disproportionately had the lowest cost structures. Some of that reflects legitimate efficiency. Some of it reflects the compression of driver pay, driver qualification, maintenance investment, and insurance quality to levels that the professional trucking industry should find alarming.

At the absolute bottom of the freight value chain, below low-value freight, is no-value freight. Garbage. Municipal solid waste. Scrap. Materials with zero commercial worth. This category not only attracts the worst carriers but also operates in a regulatory space where normal accountability structures do not apply. Under 49 CFR Part 371, broker authority requirements apply to arranging transportation of property with commercial value. Certain exempt commodities, including categories of solid waste, have historically fallen entirely outside the broker authority framework. You do not need federal broker authority, a surety bond, or FMCSA registration to arrange the movement of trash between carriers. The accountability chain that broker regulation creates in the legitimate freight market simply does not exist in the exempt commodity space. Those carriers operate at highway speed and full weight alongside everyone else.

The spot market broker system actually produces an absolutely toxic carrier pool. The bottom feeders of the industry.

Tea Technologies, through its Highway Intelligence and Risk Platform, aggregates FMCSA inspection and crash data from carrier bill-of-lading records captured during roadside inspections. When a carrier gets inspected with a load on board, the inspection record captures the broker, the shipper, and the carrier in a single data point. It is not self-reported. It is what enforcement officers found when they stopped the truck. THE TEA analysis of carrier history data for CH Robinson and Total Quality Logistics, the two largest freight brokers in the country, covers 1,730 carriers across the two datasets. This is what that data shows.

CH Robinson manages 37 million shipments annually and works with 450,000 contract carriers, according to its own description. The TEA carrier history dataset documents 923 carriers with inspection records in the system. Of those 923 carriers, 30 had fatal crashes in the past 24 months, producing 46 fatalities. Seven hundred of 923 carriers (76 percent) have never received an FMCSA safety rating because they have never been subject to a compliance review. One hundred thirty-two have vehicle out-of-service rates at or above 50 percent. 74 have driver OOS rates at or above 50%.

TQL’s carrier dataset covers 807 carriers. Seven had fatal crashes in 24 months, producing 18 fatal crash events and 18 confirmed fatalities. Eighty-five carriers had at least one crash. Ninety-one percent of TQL’s carrier base, 731 carriers, have never been rated by FMCSA. One hundred forty-three have vehicle OOS rates at or above 50 percent. One hundred fifty-four have driver OOS rates at or above 50 percent. TQL has 44 carriers in its documented load history carrying an authority transfer flag from THE TEA’s cross-reference analysis, indicating patterns consistent with a prior entity operating under a new identity. That is more than seven times the six authority transfer flags in CH Robinson’s carrier base and represents a significant concentration of chameleon carrier risk inside a single broker’s documented carrier pool.

In CH Robinson’s carrier history, Twin Carrier LLC out of Georgia, DOT 3518735, has had 62 crashes in 24 months, two of them fatal, two people dead. Three simultaneous SMS alerts. Unrated. $1,000 coverage, canceled. Also in CH Robinson’s carrier history. Twin Carrier is the primary and one of the oldest Super Ego network carriers, which also has two wrongful death murder cases pending in Pennsylvania and Ohio by two different drivers.

Koleaseco Inc out of Michigan, DOT 667715, carries 13 crashes in 24 months, one of them fatal, with four people killed in that single crash event. Rated satisfactory on a prior review from FMCSA.

Clement Transport LLC, out of New Jersey, DOT 3371628, has had 20 crashes, one fatal, two people dead. One hundred percent Hazmat OOS rate, 24% driver OOS rate, and a 38% vehicle OOS rate, meaning every driver this carrier has had pulled from the road during roadside inspection. Every single one was put out of service after a hazmat inspection. Also in CH Robinson’s carrier history.

Cobra Inc out of Pennsylvania, DOT 3525693, 30 crashes, one fatal. Unrated. The insurer listed is Universal Casualty Risk Retention Group, a risk retention group that is a systemic concern in the commercial trucking insurance market. An RRG insuring a carrier with 30 crashes.

Contract Freighters Inc., out of Missouri, DOT 70289, is one of the larger operations in the dataset with 104 crashes in 24 months, four of them fatal, four dead. A satisfactory safety rating.

There is a mechanism that makes all of this possible, and the legal question that determines whether it changes remains open.

In most spot-market brokerage operations, verifying a carrier for a load typically follows this process. Confirm the DOT number exists in SAFER. Confirm the MC number is active. Confirm that a certificate of insurance is on file. Confirm they’re not rated Unsatisfactory or Conditional by FMCSA. That is it for many operations. It checks that the carrier is technically permitted to operate, which is a different thing entirely from checking whether the carrier is safe to operate, ensuring your carrier’s freight arrives safely between origin and destination. There’s also the fact that a large portion of US carrier fleets have no rating at all and remain “unrated.” For most brokers, when selecting a carrier for a load, a rating and an authority that can be purchased for as little as $1,200 are good enough. A carrier can pay $300, rent a rental truck, get some self-attested, non-underwritten, instant issue coverage, and you’re a trucker.

The reason this three-box process is standard in much of the spot market is exactly what the Supreme Court is currently deciding.

On March 4, 2026, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC. Shawn Montgomery was parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois on December 7, 2017, when a CH Robinson-hired carrier struck him at highway speed. He lost his leg. He sued CH Robinson on a negligent hiring theory, arguing the broker selected a carrier with known safety problems. Lower courts dismissed the claim, ruling that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 preempts state-law negligence claims against freight brokers because carrier selection is a core broker service within the FAAAA’s preemption scope. CH Robinson argued to the Supreme Court that brokers should not face state liability because they do not own or operate the trucks and because state liability patchworks would undermine the uniform federal transportation framework. The U.S. government filed a brief in support of CH Robinson. Montgomery’s attorney, Paul Clement, argued that Congress designed the FAAAA to deregulate economics, not to eliminate state safety tort law, and that the safety exception specifically preserved these kinds of claims.

TQL is not simply watching from the sidelines, because the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Cox v. Total Quality Logistics was directly cited in the legal analysis of the circuit split that brought this case to the Supreme Court. TQL is materially affected by whatever standard the Court establishes. A decision is expected by the end of June.

If preemption holds, there is zero legal downside to putting Kooperativ LLC on a load while it has four SMS alerts and $750 in canceled insurance. Confirm the DOT. Confirm the MC. Confirm the certificate. Move the freight. Collect the spread. If someone dies, the carrier’s minimum insurance covers what it can, and the broker’s exposure is gone. Check the three boxes. Cash the check.

If the safety exception survives and negligent hiring claims proceed under state law, a broker that put a bad carrier on a load while Tea Technology was showing 300+ crashes and eight fatalities and a high alert risk score will face a very uncomfortable conversation about what it means to exercise due diligence when data tools exist, are publicly available, and were not consulted. Accountability creates incentive. That is the entire theory of tort law. It is why the brokerage industry has invested so heavily in the preemption argument.

The CBS 60 Minutes investigation that aired April 12 documented the Super Ego Holding network, a Serbia-connected operation that FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs called one of the most notorious chameleon schemes on American highways. I contributed to that investigation. What Bill Whitaker and the CBS team documented was not an anomaly. It was a visible example of a systemic condition. Drivers being told to physically alter DOT numbers on truck doors. Rate confirmations are being fraudulently modified to cut driver pay by $700 per load. Eighteen-hour shift demands. Throughout it all, freight is moving because someone in a broker’s office confirmed three things on a SAFER screen and booked the load.

The bond system, which is supposed to create financial accountability when brokers fail, is inadequate by the numbers and by history. The $75,000 requirement was set in 2013 by MAP-21 after sitting at $10,000 for 40 years. When MAP-21 raised it, more than 7,500 brokerages closed because they could not get bonded at the higher amount. $75,000 still does not cover what it needs to cover. A broker handling 50 loads a month can easily carry $100,000 or more in outstanding carrier payables at any moment. When that broker collapses, the $75,000 is divided among all claimants. FMCSA data shows more than 400 brokers experience bond drawdowns annually. Nearly one in five has total claims exceeding the bond. The average recovered amount is around $1,900, and the reason that number is so depressed is that carriers have learned that filing against an exhausted bond produces $312 checks.

The fraud layer makes it worse. Double-brokering and identity-fraud operations buy old MC numbers with clean histories, spoof phone numbers, run a few weeks of loads without paying carriers, then dissolve and reappear under a new identity. The surety bond on the fraudulent operation may have been written against an entity that barely existed. The trail ends with whoever made the phone call.

If you are a small carrier or owner-operator running spot freight, there are things you can do that the regulatory system will not do for you. Verify broker authority on SAFER before you pick up the load, not after. Understand that the $75,000 bond is a last resort that may already be pledged against 46 other carriers in the queue. Trade credit insurance deserves serious consideration. Companies like Allianz Trade, Coface, and Atradius write accounts receivable insurance that pays 80 to 90 percent of an invoice if the broker defaults. Premiums run roughly 0.2 to 1 percent of insured receivables, depending on volume and claims history. Some freight factoring companies bundle credit protection into their non-recourse factoring programs. Ask specifically about that option. It is not free, but it is substantially better than waiting six weeks for a $312 check.

Build shipper-direct relationships wherever you can. The structural difference between contract freight with an established shipper and spot freight from an unknown broker on a load board is the difference between a business relationship you understand and extending credit to a stranger. Not always available. Not always practical. But worth pursuing deliberately, especially in a market environment where spot market broker fraud is running at documented historic levels.

For every compliance manager, fleet safety director, and carrier qualification team working for a shipper or larger motor carrier, the data in this article is a call to action. The carrier qualification tools exist. THE TEA, Highway, Searchcarriers, Blue Wire, Genlogs, the FMCSA SMS system, SAFER, crash history, OOS rates, authority transfer indicators, and insurance verification beyond confirming a certificate exists; these are not exotic or expensive tools. They are available. The question the Supreme Court is answering is whether there is a legal consequence to choosing not to use them when the carrier you hired kills someone.

The answer arrives by the end of June. Nine justices will determine whether the people who select the carriers bear any responsibility for who they select. If the answer is no, the spot market continues to operate exactly as reflected in the data in this article; some carriers, with 300+ crashes and 8 fatalities, remain carriers someone puts on a load. If the answer is yes, every broker in the country will soon reconsider what carrier vetting looks like, and the three-box process will need to become substantially more serious.

The Tennessee owner-operator with his $312 check already knows which answer would have helped him. The families represented in those 64 fatalities documented across two brokers’ carrier histories probably have a view on it too. The people driving vehicles on American highways alongside trucks operated by carriers with canceled insurance, multiple BASIC alerts, and a driver who failed his last roadside inspection deserve to know that someone is asking these questions, even though a June ruling will answer them.

THE OLD ROAD

The stagecoach was the first freight network in America. Gold moved on it. Mail moved on it. Land moved on it, deeds folded into saddlebags crossing deserts where there was no law to speak of. And men robbed it. They robbed the coaches in Arizona. They robbed them in Missouri. They robbed them in Pennsylvania. The outlaw and the freight network have been traveling the same road since before the United States was old enough to know what either one was.

Rail came next, bringing the same parasites with it. The Pinkertons were not hired to guard trains because the trains were safe. They were hired because an organized criminal enterprise understood, before the economists did, that transportation infrastructure is wealth in motion, and wealth in motion is the most vulnerable kind of wealth there is. Jesse James did not need a doctorate in logistics to understand that a train carrying payroll was a better target than a bank. He just needed to know the schedule.

Modern trucking is roughly 100 years old. The first Motor Carrier Act was passed in 1935. The interstate highway system that made long-haul trucking economically dominant was not complete until 1992. The regulatory framework that governs the industry today, the USDOT numbers, the FMCSA, the commercial driver’s license system, the broker bond requirements, the new entrant monitoring program, all of it was built, patched, amended and inadequately funded across a span of time that a single working trucker can remember from start to finish.

The American trucking system is not ancient. It is not hardened by centuries of adversarial pressure. It is a young system, built for access and speed, designed in a more trusting era, operating today in an environment that has changed fundamentally around it. And the criminals who exploit it did not arrive yesterday either. The families and networks now running freight fraud in Southern California, in the San Fernando Valley, in Glendale and Burbank and North Hollywood, some of them have been at this since before there was an FMCSA to evade.

The people who built those networks are not all gone. In some cases, they are still alive, still in the industry, still operating, their methods refined by decades of practice and their infrastructure layered deep enough that the regulatory apparatus has never successfully reached the core. This is the story of how that happened, who built it, what it looks like now, and why the window to dismantle it is closing faster than the government seems to understand.

THE ORIGINALS

In 2003, two childhood friends from Glendale, California, graduated from Glendale High School and started a company. Steve Avetyan and Alfred Megrabyan called themselves, without apparent embarrassment, ‘the originals.’ They did not mean original in the artistic sense. They meant they were the first. The first to figure out how to build a scalable freight fraud network in America using the Armenian immigrant community as both labor force and protective camouflage.

The network they built, the All State Association, headquartered in San Fernando, California, would eventually generate revenues of between $500 million and $600 million a year. It would operate branches in Glendale, North Hollywood, Burbank, and Las Vegas. It would employ hundreds of sales agents, directly or indirectly. It would finance the startup of more than 500 transportation companies and brokerages across Southern California and beyond. It would recruit agents in Armenia. And it would operate a factoring company, Royalty Capital Inc., registered in Nevada but sharing an address and key officers with All State itself, that would allow the money from the network to move through a financial instrument before anyone could trace its origin.

Before Steve Avetyan was ‘the originals,’ there was his uncle.

Rubik Avetyan, 55 at the time of sentencing, of Sunland, California, was the patriarch. He ran a trucking fraud scheme with his sons, Alfred and Allen Avetyan, that targeted 165 brokers and carriers over a 10-month period beginning in 2008. The scheme was straightforward: they created a motor carrier called State Transport Inc., registered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, using false and altered identification. They obtained loads from brokers. They gave those loads to legitimate carriers who actually hauled them. Then they collected payment from the brokers and paid nothing to the carriers. The difference went into the Avetyan family accounts. The carriers, small operators running one or two trucks, absorbed losses they were never meant to survive.

On March 4, 2011, U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo sentenced Rubik Avetyan to 50 months in federal prison. His sons, Alfred and Allen, each received 60 months. The family was ordered to pay $1,118,723 jointly in restitution to their 165 victims. The DOT Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms worked the case.

Steve Avetyan was never charged. He called the scheme his uncle did ‘stupid things.’ He said they deserved to go to jail. He also said, in the same conversation with FreightWaves in 2021, that his uncle and cousins were ‘again working in the industry after completing their jail sentences.’ The network did not stop when Rubik went to prison. It reorganized. It scaled. It became something Rubik’s generation could not have imagined.

THE FRANCHISE MODEL

Steve Avetyan compared the All State Association to a McDonald’s franchise. It was the most honest thing he said in any public interview. The franchise model is exactly what he built, and understanding it is essential to understanding why it is so difficult to prosecute and why it has grown to the scale it has.

Here is how the franchise operates. A person, almost always from the Armenian immigrant community in Southern California or from Armenia itself, approaches All State. All State finances them to start a motor carrier or brokerage. The startup gets a USDOT number, a load board presence, and access to All State’s technology platform, which tracks truck and trailer availability across freight lanes nationwide. The startup pays All State 20 percent of revenue. In exchange, they get what Avetyan described as ‘the back-end stuff’: capital, financing, truck access, software, and the tools to build the business.

A small trucking company or brokerage operating legitimately cannot afford to pay 20 percent of revenue to a parent organization and remain viable. The math does not work unless the revenue is generated through fraud. Double-brokering loads without authorization, not paying the carriers who actually haul the freight, generating fraudulent invoices through the factoring company, and collecting money that does not belong to you is how you make 20 percent viable. The franchise model incentivizes fraud because fraud is the only way to afford the franchise.

The results are visible in the data. Investigators examining Southern California motor carrier registrations found more than 400 active MC numbers registered to addresses in Glendale, Tujunga, North Hollywood, and Burbank. Those cities could ‘maybe hold between five and ten legitimate trucking companies,’ according to one freight industry investigator who spent two years mapping the network. The other 390-plus registrations are something else. They are the franchise.

Load board provider DAT shut down 300 users for alleged network-related fraud. Carrier411, which tracks carrier behavior through broker and shipper reports, documented more than 1,000 FreightGuard reports against companies in the network. Brokers who filed complaints described being harassed with phone calls and emails until they removed the reports. In one documented case, an employee of a network-connected company threatened to harm himself unless a FreightGuard report was taken down. The network protects itself not just through legal and corporate structure, but through intimidation.

THE WASHING MACHINE

The factoring company is where the scheme becomes money laundering, and understanding why requires a brief explanation of how freight factoring works.

When a carrier hauls a load, they invoice the broker or shipper for payment. Standard payment terms in freight are net 15 to 30 days, meaning the carrier waits 2 to 4 weeks to get paid. For a small trucking operation running on thin margins, that delay creates constant cash flow pressure. Factoring companies solve that problem by purchasing the invoice at a discount, typically advancing 90 to 95 percent of the invoice value immediately, then collecting the full amount from the broker or shipper when it comes due. The carrier gets cash today. The factoring company makes a few percent on the transaction.

In a legitimate operation, factoring is a straightforward financial service. In the Glendale network, it is the mechanism by which stolen money is washed clean.

Here is the cycle. A carrier in the network double-brokers a load, meaning it takes a load from a broker, finds a cheaper carrier to actually haul it, pockets the difference, and then fails to pay the carrier who did the work. The moment the load is dispatched, the network carrier submits an invoice to Royalty Capital, or Crossroads Services, or Asteria Corp, the three factoring entities that industry investigators and carriers on TruckersReport have identified as operating in the orbit of All State. The factoring company advances 90% of the invoice amount immediately. The money is in hand before any dispute can be raised.

When the shipper or the original broker pays the invoice in full, the funds flow back to the factoring company. If the shipper disputes the invoice because the load was double-brokered without authorization, the factoring company holds a fraudulent receivable that it will never collect. But if the factoring company is owned by the same family running the fraud, the loss is fictional. Money moved from the left pocket to the right pocket, and the carrier who actually hauled the load never got paid.

Royalty Capital Inc. is documented in California Secretary of State filings as owned by Steve Avetyan. Its mailing address is the same as the All State Association in San Fernando. Its business filings list Armen Karibyan, the CEO of All State Trucklines, as a corporate officer. Royalty Capital and All State share an office in Las Vegas. The factoring company and the brokerage are not separate businesses serving each other at arm’s length. They are the same business, and they are designed to be.

Carriers and brokers throughout the industry have learned that a company factoring through any of these three entities is almost certainly part of the Glendale network, and the freightguard reports, unpaid invoices, and load board complaints that follow confirm it.

THE CALL CENTERS

The Glendale network is the domestic infrastructure of Armenian freight fraud. But it is not the only model, and the domestic infrastructure, as sprawling as it is, is arguably the less sophisticated half of what has been built.

In January 2025, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania filed criminal charges against Serj Gevorgyan, also known as Seryozha Gevorgyan, for running nine fraudulent motor carrier entities from call centers located in Armenia, 6,000 miles from the freight lanes his companies were allegedly robbing.

The nine entities Gevorgyan allegedly controlled were: SGSH Trans LLC (USDOT 3214913), Next Level Brokerage Inc. (USDOT 3602905), Smartdrive LLC (USDOT 3602241), Key Solutions Group Inc. (USDOT 3336195), Meelemann and Co. (USDOT 3738505), S4S Logistics Inc. (USDOT 3821559), Yellow Elephant Corp. (USDOT 3975319), Blue Joker Inc. (USDOT 3980883), and Pink Donut Freight Inc. (USDOT 3980888). Additional entities, including Premier Capital and Lowcoster LLC, were also identified in the investigation.

Each company was registered with FMCSA as a legitimate motor carrier. Each listed U.S. business addresses that were virtual office, mailbox services, or an entirely fictitious location. Each used nominee names as stated owners and officers, individuals who had little or no actual involvement in the companies’ operations. Each claimed to be a U.S.-based, domestically controlled carrier. None of it was true.

The actual operations ran from call centers in Yerevan. Staff monitoring American load boards during U.S. business hours, achieving that coverage by working evening and overnight Armenian shifts, would accept loads on behalf of Gevorgyan’s companies, immediately re-broker them to legitimate carriers at lower rates, collect payment from the shippers, and not pay the carriers. The call centers had scripts, systems, quality control, and management. They maintained the fraud convincingly enough to delay detection for months or even years.

The choice of Armenia as a base of operations was not sentimental. It was strategic. Operating from Yerevan places the command structure beyond the practical reach of U.S. law enforcement. Search warrants in Pennsylvania do not execute in Armenia. Raids that could happen in a day in Philadelphia require months of diplomatic process in Yerevan, if they happen at all. Extradition from Armenia, even when secured, can be fought through foreign courts for years. The criminal who runs his operation from 6,000 miles away has purchased himself time, and in freight fraud, time is money.

The multi-agency coalition that eventually built the Gevorgyan case included the DOT Office of Inspector General, Homeland Security Investigations, IRS Criminal Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Diplomatic Security Service, the Social Security Administration OIG, the Department of Labor OIG, and Health and Human Services OIG. Eight federal agencies. Three to four years of work. The result was the filing of a criminal information in January 2025. Whether Gevorgyan will actually stand in an American courtroom to face those charges depends on the outcome of extradition proceedings that remain unresolved.

THE ORGANIZED CRIME BACKDROP

The Glendale brokerage network and the Yerevan call center network are not unrelated phenomena. They are two expressions of a single underlying reality: Armenian Organized Crime, a Russian mafia-affiliated transnational criminal organization that has made Los Angeles County a center of U.S. operations, is embedded in American trucking at a depth that freight fraud statistics do not capture.

In May 2025, federal authorities arrested 13 alleged members and associates of rival Armenian organized crime syndicates in California and Florida. The charges included attempted murder, kidnapping, illegal firearm possession, bank and wire fraud, and cargo theft totaling more than $83 million from Amazon alone. The Artuni Enterprise, led by Ara Artuni of Porter Ranch, had enrolled as Amazon carriers, contracted for legitimate trucking routes, diverted from those routes mid-transit, and stolen the shipments. Artuni and his rival, Robert Amiryan of Hollywood, had been in a violent power struggle for control of the San Fernando Valley since 2022, a struggle that included an attempted murder ordered by Artuni and a retaliatory kidnapping organized by Amiryan.

Federal affidavits described the organization as avtoritet, the Russian term for ‘authority,’ the rank structure used by Russian mafia-affiliated criminal networks. Armenian Organized Crime operates with the infrastructure and hierarchy of an international cartel, as Homeland Security Investigations puts it, because that is what it is. The trucking component is not an anomaly. It is a core revenue stream, one that has been running for decades and has grown more sophisticated with each passing year.

The connection between the organized crime layer and the brokerage franchise layer is not always documented in public records. What is documented is the overlap of geography, ethnicity, family ties, and operational methods. The Rubik Avetyan family served their time and returned to the industry. The Artuni Enterprise committed $83 million to cargo theft through trucking routes. The Gevorgyan call center stole millions through double-brokering from 6,000 miles away. These are not isolated actors. They operate in the same ecosystem, share the same regulatory vulnerabilities, and, in some cases, the same factoring infrastructure.

HOW THE SYSTEM ENABLES IT

For about $1,500, anyone in the United States can register with the FMCSA to obtain a motor carrier authority. There is no background check. No proof that trucks exist. No verification that the listed officers are real or that the listed address is occupied. The system accepts the application, processes the payment, and issues a USDOT number. That number is the key to the freight network. With it, you can access load boards, accept freight, and collect payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars before anyone realizes you never intended to deliver.

The $75,000 broker bond serves as a financial backstop that carriers can claim against when a broker does not pay. But the bond only applies to brokers. A motor carrier, which is what Gevorgyan’s companies are registered as, does not need a bond. And nothing prevents a registered motor carrier from immediately starting to broker loads without authorization, which is illegal but undetectable in real time. By the time complaints accumulate and FMCSA identifies the pattern, the entity has already stolen what it came for and can dissolve and re-register under a new name in days.

FMCSA has roughly 1,000 employees to police approximately one million active motor carrier authorities. The new entrant monitoring program is supposed to catch bad actors within the first 18 months through audits and enhanced scrutiny. But there are not enough investigators to audit every new entrant, audits are often delayed until late in the window, and a network that registers nine companies at staggered intervals spreads its red flags across multiple monitoring periods. By the time the pattern connects, the money is gone.

The 18 months are too long. The verification at registration is too thin. The bond exemption for motor carriers is a loophole the size of a freight lane. The enforcement staffing is inadequate by an order of magnitude. These are not secrets. They have been documented in inspector general reports, congressional testimony, industry trade publications, and the court filings in every major freight fraud prosecution over the past 15 years. The government knows. It has always been known. The fixes have not happened because they cost money that Congress has not appropriated, and because the freight industry, which has every interest in low barriers to entry, has lobbied against the regulations that would raise them.

WHAT KILLS IT

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs stood before thousands of truck drivers at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville in late March 2026 and made promises. Barrs announced active investigations into chameleon carriers, identity theft, registration issues, fraudulent ELD devices, and CDL fraud. He said FMCSA was ‘working actively with FBI, ATF, DOJ, DHS’ on cases that crossed into federal criminal territory. Duffy said spot rates would go up as fraud was purged from the system. Both men said the right things.

The test is not the speech. The test is whether the structural fixes follow. Speeches at trade shows do not close the bond loophole. Speeches do not triple FMCSA’s investigative capacity. Speeches do not implement AI-driven pattern recognition to flag the registration anomalies that Gevorgyan’s nine companies should have triggered on day one. Speeches do not require physical verification of business addresses or video confirmation of stated owners. Speeches do not renegotiate extradition treaties with Armenia or create real-time intelligence sharing with foreign law enforcement.

What would actually kill the network is unglamorous and expensive. It is mandatory to have site inspections for all new entrants within 90 days. It is a bond requirement that extends to motor carriers who broker loads. It is a broker bond scaled from $75,000 to $250,000 or higher. It is a registration system that cross-references phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses across all applications to flag suspicious commonalities. It is 500 additional FMCSA investigators. It is a central fraud database that carriers can actually access to check a broker’s payment history before hauling a load. It is TWIC cards and biometric identification for every owner, officer, and operator in the industry, creating an accountability trail that follows the freight.

Some of that is coming. Some of it will not. The factoring fraud angle, the money laundering dimension of the scheme, is where federal investigators beyond FMCSA have the most leverage, because once the money flows through a financial instrument rather than a direct freight payment, the jurisdiction shifts to the financial crimes units that have more tools, more resources, and longer memory. The IRS Criminal Investigation Division was on the Gevorgyan case for a reason. If the factoring companies connected to the Avetyan network are shown to have facilitated the laundering of double-brokering proceeds, the cases that follow are not freight fraud cases. They are RICO cases.

The Rubik Avetyan conviction in 2011 did not end the network. It was reorganized and scaled. The Gevorgyan indictment in January 2025 did not end the offshore call center model. New entities will emerge with different names and USDOT numbers, while retaining the same Armenian call centers. The May 2025 arrests of 13 Armenian organized crime members in California and Florida did not decapitate the organization. The power struggle between Artuni and Amiryan was a franchise dispute, not an existential crisis.

What kills it is sustained, multi-year, multi-agency pressure applied at every layer simultaneously: registration, enforcement, prosecution, financial crime, and international cooperation. That has never happened. The question is whether the current administration’s stated commitment to freight fraud is the beginning of that sustained effort or another cycle of well-intentioned speeches followed by inadequate follow-through.

The founders of this network are, in some cases, still alive. The infrastructure they built is 30 years old and running at a scale that dwarfs anything Rubik Avetyan envisioned from Sunland. The window to dismantle it before it becomes so embedded that it is structurally irreplaceable is not permanent.

The stagecoach robbers are long dead. The railyard thieves are long dead. The trucking fraudsters of 2026 are, in several documented cases, the same families that started doing this when the regulatory architecture was still new enough to have obvious gaps. Those gaps have been widened, not closed, by 30 years of underfunded enforcement and deferred structural reform.

The road belongs to whoever shows up to take it. Right now, too much of it still belongs to the wrong people.

SOURCES AND DOCUMENTATION

DOT OIG Case Report: Rubik Avetyan et al., U.S. District Court Middle District of Pennsylvania, sentencing March 4, 2011. Available at oig.dot.gov.

Criminal Information: United States v. Serj Gevorgyan, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, filed January 29, 2025. Nine Subject Companies identified: SGSH Trans LLC (DOT 3214913), Next Level Brokerage Inc. (DOT 3602905), Smartdrive LLC (DOT 3602241), Key Solutions Group Inc. (DOT 3336195), Meelemann and Co. (DOT 3738505), S4S Logistics Inc. (DOT 3821559), Yellow Elephant Corp. (DOT 3975319), Blue Joker Inc. (DOT 3980883), Pink Donut Freight Inc. (DOT 3980888).

ICE/DOJ Press Release: Thirteen Members and Associates of Rival Armenian Syndicates Arrested, May 20, 2025. Cases prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of California.

FreightWaves Investigation: ‘CEO Denies Ties to Sophisticated Double-Brokering Scheme in Southern California,’ July 13, 2021; ‘Former Employees Shed Light on Sophisticated Double-Brokering Network,’ January 5, 2022.

California Secretary of State: Royalty Capital Inc. officer filings, All State Association filings, corporate records for Armen Karibyan.

TruckersReport Forum: ‘Glendale CA Double-Brokers’ thread, identifying Royalty Capital, Crossroads Services, and Asteria Corp as factoring entities connected to the network.

The Tea Substack: ‘Day 30. Armenian Ghost Fleet,’ October 6, 2025, by Rob Carpenter. Comprehensive analysis of Gevorgyan’s fraud mechanics and FMCSA systemic failures.

FMCSA SAFER Database: DOT numbers for All State-affiliated entities confirmed active and inactive.

How a federal bribery case became a living network that still operates in public view

One of the best features we rolled out at The Tea Intel is an OpenCorporates integration and the addition of all ELDT providers. This story illustrates how our platform handles all investigative positions from one platform.

The federal investigation into trucks and CA DMV employees ended with guilty pleas, prison sentences, and a Justice Department press release declaring that fraudulent CDL licenses had been purged from California’s roads. The problem is that the ecosystem that generated those licenses, the training schools, the carrier identities, and the network infrastructure never fully went away. It reorganized.

What follows is a full accounting of the federal case, the people it named, and what their entities look like in the FMCSA database as of March 2026, years after the last sentence was handed down.

Part I: The crime

The scheme, as described by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, was built around a single systemic vulnerability: the California DMV database could be accessed and altered by insiders, and those insiders were for sale.

Between September 2014 and June 2017, a network of driving school operators, employees, and paid DMV workers conspired to issue commercial driver’s licenses to applicants who had never passed the required written and skills tests, and in some cases had never taken them. What should have been a safety checkpoint became a product. The CDL, the foundational credential that authorizes someone to operate an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle on public roads, was sold.

The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General summarized the case. DMV employee Lisa Terraciano was linked to at least 148 fraudulent CDLs. DMV employee Kari Scattaglia was linked to at least 68. A third DMV employee, Shawana Denise Harris, entered fraudulent test scores for 185 applicants and received approximately $277,500 in bribes over the course of the scheme. That is not one rogue employee.

The school-side operator at the center of federal prosecution was Jagpal Singh, owner of Calcutta Truck School in North Hollywood. In December 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that Singh was sentenced to more than 3 years in federal prison for bribing DMV employees to issue commercial driver’s licenses to unqualified drivers. Prosecutors said he paid to have DMV records altered so applicants appeared to have passed tests when they had not.

Two of Singh’s co-defendants pleaded guilty in August 2021. Parminder Singh, a Calcutta Truck School employee, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, identity fraud, and unauthorized computer access. Tajinder Singh, described in the DOT OIG case summary as the owner of a trucking company, pleaded guilty to fraud involving identification documents. Tajinder Singh paid a DMV employee to obtain commercial driver’s licenses for applicants who had not taken the written CDL test, according to the DOT OIG.

The DMV employees fared worse in sentencing. Harris was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Terraciano was sentenced to three years and four months. Scattaglia was sentenced to two years and eight months. The federal record is clear on what happened. What it does not tell you is what came next.

Part II: The infrastructure that did not go away

When federal investigators close a case, they measure success by the number of convictions. They do not typically map what the ecosystem looks like 24 months after the last supervised release ends. That job falls to the industry, and to the FMCSA data that anyone with a browser can access.

What the public record shows is continuity. The same phone numbers. The same addresses. The same family of entity names. In one documented case, a convicted federal defendant listed as the primary officer of a new carrier registration after the ink on his sentence was dry.

The anchor address: 15838 Leadwell St., Van Nuys, CA 91406

A single residential address in Van Nuys sits at the center of this network’s physical footprint. At 15838 Leadwell St., a four-bedroom house built in 2005 on a quiet residential street, multiple business registrations, carrier identities, and financial filings converge.

The FMCSA carrier profile for King Star Transport Inc (USDOT 2193797, MC-761380) lists 15838 Leadwell St. as its physical address. That carrier, now inactive, was the trucking company owned by Tajinder Singh, the same Tajinder Singh identified as a co-defendant in the federal CDL bribery case, who pleaded guilty in August 2021.

The original Gobind Truck Driving School Inc. (USDOT 2835079) also used 15838 Leadwell St. as its FMCSA-registered address and listed phone number (818) 813-1646. That entity is no longer authorized to operate in interstate commerce.

California Secretary of State records and UCC filings examined for this report show the same Leadwell address linked to multiple additional entities and individuals: King Star Transport Inc., US Express Transport Inc., Kulwant Enterprises Inc., and personal names including Jagdish Singh (the deceased father of Tajinder, listed as property owner), Kulwinder Kaur, Rupinder Singh, and Singh Satnam.

The property owner of record is Singh Jagdish. A solar permit was pulled on the property in June 2022, more than two years after Jagdish Singh’s death in May 2019 and more than a year after Tajinder Singh’s guilty plea. The property remains in use.

The phone number: (818) 813-1646

In network analysis, a shared phone number is one of the strongest identity linkages available. Phone numbers are harder to accidentally share than addresses, and they require deliberate registration. The sequence of events around the number (818) 813-1646 is worth documenting.

That number appears in SAFER as the registered contact for Gobind Truck Driving School Inc. (USDOT 2835079), the original school entity at the center of this story. It also appears in commercial carrier directories as the listed number for King Star Transport Inc. (USDOT 2193797), the carrier owned by Tajinder Singh.

Then, a new carrier entity, UGL1 Inc. (USDOT 4259362, MC-1652311), appears in the FMCSA records. It is registered in North Hollywood, California. It is inactive. Its listed phone number is (661) 417-7881, a Bakersfield-area number. Its registered email address is UGL18188131646@GMAIL.COM.

That email address embeds the digits 8188131646, the exact digits of (818) 813-1646, King Star Transport’s phone number. That is a deliberate encoding of a legacy identifier into the official contact record of a new entity. And the primary officer listed for UGL1 Inc. in FMCSA records is Tajinder Singh.

Tajinder Singh

Tajinder Singh pleaded guilty on August 19, 2021, to fraud involving identification documents in connection with the CDL bribery scheme. He received a sentence of time served plus seven months of home confinement and 12 months of supervised release. His supervised release ended, by most calculations, in late 2023.

At some point after his involvement in the bribery scheme and potentially after his supervised release concluded, Tajinder Singh appears in FMCSA records as the primary officer of UGL1 Inc. (USDOT 4259362). That carrier is registered, designated MC-1652311, and is currently inactive.

There is no federal law that categorically bars a person convicted in a CDL fraud scheme from later forming or operating a trucking company. That is one of the systemic gaps this case exposes. FMCSA has no automatic cross-check mechanism that flags when a new DOT registrant was previously convicted of transportation-related fraud. The registration process is largely self-certifying. So Tajinder Singh can appear in the federal carrier database, and without a human investigator running a specific name-match against prior fraud cases, that registration may never trigger review.

This report does not allege that UGL1 Inc. is currently operating or that any new crime has been committed. It documents that the federal registration exists, that the primary officer’s name matches that of a convicted co-defendant in the CDL bribery case, and that the email address registered to that entity encodes a phone number associated with the defendant’s prior carrier identity.

Part III: The ELDT-registered school that keeps reincarnating

The ‘Gobind’ brand name is the clearest example in this case of what might be called the corporate costume change: same name, new shell, new paperwork footprint, continued operation.

California Secretary of State records show three distinct iterations of Gobind-named entities filed in different years, each with different statuses and registered agents. The first, Gobind Truck Driving School Inc. (entity #3850596), filed in December 2015, is currently suspended by the Franchise Tax Board. The second, Gobind Truck Driving School Inc. (entity #4640762), filed in September 2020, while Tajinder Singh was under federal indictment, has been terminated. The third, Gobind Truck and Bus Driving School Inc. (entity #4690241), filed in January 2021, just months before Tajinder Singh’s guilty plea, is currently active.

That third entity, Gobind Truck and Bus Driving School Inc., holds FMCSA carrier registration USDOT 4209228, registered March 13, 2024, with a last MCS-150 update of the same date. It is currently active and classified as intrastate only. Its listed primary officer in FMCSA records is Manpreet Kaur. Its registered phone is (818) 915-7988. Its registered email is GOBINDDRIVINGSCHOOL@GMAIL.COM.

This entity is registered in the FMCSA Training Provider Registry as an Entry-Level Driver Training (ELDT) provider.

ELDT training became mandatory by the FMCSA beginning on February 7, 2022. The rule requires that entry-level CDL applicants complete a standardized training program with a provider listed in the federal Training Provider Registry before taking certain CDL skills tests. Being listed in the TPR means a provider can submit training completion records to FMCSA, and those records flow into the CDL issuance pipeline through the same state DMV infrastructure that was compromised in this case.

The FMCSA Training Provider Registry lists an active in-person training location for this entity at 1056 W. Ave. N., Palmdale, CA 93551, with the phone number (818) 915-7988. That is the same number listed in the carrier’s FMCSA profile. The provider is listed as offering Class A theory and behind-the-wheel training, Class B theory, passenger theory, and hazmat theory.

A separate Gobind-branded school location in Castaic, California, also appears in the Training Provider Registry, and at least one additional location in Bakersfield, California, has been documented in commercial review listings. The Castaic location sits in the same Santa Clarita Valley corridor as several other entities that appear in this network’s associated-entity orbit.

The TPR is built on provider self-registration and self-certification. Providers apply for registry listing without undergoing background checks on principals’ criminal histories. There is no mechanism in the current TPR framework to flag when a training provider shares a name, phone number, or address with entities previously connected to CDL fraud investigations. FMCSA has not publicly indicated whether any review of Gobind’s TPR registration occurred in connection with the underlying federal case.

The documented fact is the cross-system identity match: the same brand name, the same phone number, and the same operational footprint connecting an active ELDT provider to a cluster of entities whose principals were convicted in a federal CDL bribery scheme. This report does not allege that the current training is fraudulent, that any specific trainee is unqualified, or that Manpreet Kaur has done anything improper. What the record establishes is that the Gobind brand survived the prosecution, reorganized under a new entity, obtained ELDT registration, and is today feeding training records into the same state and federal licensing systems that were exploited before.

Part IV: The full entity map, what FMCSA data shows

Carrier linkage tools used for this investigation, cross-referencing phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, and equipment VINs across FMCSA records, reveal a broader network than a single snapshot of any one entity would suggest. The following table documents the entities identified, their current FMCSA status, and the specific identifiers that link them to the broader cluster.

The United Global Logistics thread

The entity association tools used in this investigation identified a carrier, United Global Logistics LLC (USDOT 3642492), connected to the UGL1 Inc. orbit via entity association signals. That carrier’s name mirrors the interpretation of ‘UGL’ in UGL1 Inc.’s entity name. The connection warrants documentation because of what the FMCSA SAFER data shows about United Global Logistics’ current safety performance.

United Global Logistics LLC is based at 27213 Banuelo Ave., Saugus, CA 91350, in the Santa Clarita Valley, the same geographic corridor as the Gobind Castaic training location. Its registered phone is (818) 915-5420. It reports 5 power units and 5 drivers. Its most recent MCS-150, filed February 12, 2025, reports 1,324,964 miles driven in calendar year 2024. It carries U.S. Mail and holds an active USDOT number.

In October 2025, United Global Logistics underwent a compliance review. FMCSA assigned it a rating of Satisfactory. However, the SAFER roadside inspection data for the 24-month period ending March 1, 2026, tells a more complicated story. Of 28 vehicle inspections conducted, 14 resulted in vehicles being placed out of service, a vehicle OOS rate of 50 percent. The national average vehicle OOS rate for the same period was 22.26 percent. United Global Logistics’ vehicle OOS rate is more than double the national average.

The carrier also recorded three crashes in the same 24-month period: zero fatal, one injury, and two tow-away incidents. It carries authority only as a property carrier, and its current operating authority status is ‘Not Authorized’, meaning it holds an active DOT number but is not currently authorized for-hire property authority under MC-1252270.

A carrier running U.S. Mail, reporting 1.3 million miles annually, with a vehicle OOS rate more than double the national average, and operating in the same geographic corridor and entity-association orbit as a cluster tied to a federal CDL fraud prosecution, is a carrier that merits enforcement attention on its own merits, regardless of any other connection documented in this report.

Part V: The governance loop that keeps looping

None of what this report documents is hidden. Every data point comes from a public federal database, a state filing, a commercial carrier directory, or a property record. The FMCSA SAFER system is publicly accessible. The Training Provider Registry is publicly accessible. The California Secretary of State’s business entity portal is publicly accessible. What is not accessible, and what apparently no agency is performing in a systematic way, is the cross-system analysis that would connect these dots before a reporter does.

The specific governance failures here are worth naming directly.

The first is the absence of a post-prosecution audit requirement. When a federal case involving CDL fraud concludes, there is no standing requirement that FMCSA, the affected state DMV, or any other regulatory body conduct a structured review of carrier and training provider registrations associated with convicted individuals. The DOJ files its press releases. FMCSA does not receive a mandatory referral. The CDL pipeline, which was the target of the underlying fraud, does not get a forensic review of what passed through it during the scheme’s active years.

The second is the ELDT registration gap. The Training Provider Registry has no background check on principals. It has no cross-reference requirement against prior fraud cases. A provider whose brand name, phone number, and geographic footprint directly overlap with a prosecuted scheme can self-register in the federal ELDT system and begin submitting training certifications to the same state licensing infrastructure that was previously compromised. That is not a hypothetical vulnerability. This story documents the realization of vulnerability.

The third is the carrier registration gap. New DOT numbers can be obtained without triggering a review of prior convictions. A convicted CDL fraud defendant can appear in FMCSA records as a primary officer of a new carrier entity, and without a human cross-referencing the name against federal case records, that registration may never be reviewed. The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, launched in 2020, tracks substance violations across the industry. There is no equivalent system for fraud convictions.

The fourth is the equipment-level linkage gap. The carrier association tools used in this investigation flagged at least one equipment VIN connection linking entities in this cluster, meaning that physical assets, not just names and phone numbers, were shared across different carrier identities. Equipment moves. When an operator changes MC numbers, the trucks do not automatically trigger a compliance review. Investigators at FMCSA have access to inspection records that contain VIN data. Cross-referencing VINs against carrier identity churn is a straightforward analytical task. It is not routinely performed.

The fifth and most systemic gap is the lack of transparency after prosecution. The public can read a press release and learn that Tajinder Singh was sentenced to time served plus seven months of home confinement. The public cannot read any official document explaining what happened to the 185-plus fraudulent CDLs that federal prosecutors documented, whether they were reviewed and revoked, what carriers employed the holders of those licenses, or whether any crashes occurred involving those drivers. The public also cannot read any official document explaining what regulatory changes were made to the CDL issuance and training pipeline in California after this case concluded, because, to the best of this reporter’s knowledge, no comprehensive after-action report has been publicly released.

Part VI: Accountability

Accountability in this context is not another press conference. It is not a legislative hearing where officials describe the problem and promise better enforcement. Accountability, in 2026, looks like a specific set of measurable actions.

First, FMCSA should review all Training Provider Registry registrations in California in which the registrant’s name, phone number, email, or address overlaps with any entity connected to the CDL fraud prosecutions documented in this report. That review should be documented, and the results made public. If the review finds no basis for concern, that finding should be published. If it finds a basis for concern, the public has a right to know what action was taken.

Second, FMCSA should review the carrier registration for UGL1 Inc. (USDOT 4259362), in which Tajinder Singh is listed as the primary officer, and the basis for that registration, given Singh’s 2021 federal conviction. The FMCSA has the authority to review a carrier’s fitness. It should exercise that authority here.

Third, United Global Logistics LLC (USDOT 3642492) should receive immediate enforcement attention given its 50 percent vehicle-out-of-service rate, regardless of any other concerns identified in this report. A carrier running U.S. Mail at 1.3 million miles annually with a vehicle OOS rate more than double the national average is a public safety problem on its own terms.

Fourth, the California DMV should be able to publicly account for what happened to the CDLs issued through the bribery scheme. Were the holders notified? Were any licenses revoked? Were any carriers employing those drivers subject to review? If that review was conducted and those answers are documented, the DMV should make them public. If that review was not conducted, that is the answer.

Fifth, Congress and FMCSA should close the ELDT registration gap. The requirement for entry-level training was a meaningful safety improvement. But self-certification into the Training Provider Registry, without background checks on principals and without cross-referencing against fraud case records, means that the very pipeline ELDT was designed to protect can still be seeded by the same networks that operated before it existed.

The Leadwell Loop is not a metaphor. It is a physical address, a phone number, a family of entity names, and a set of federal carrier registrations that, taken together, document how a prosecuted CDL fraud ecosystem reorganized and continued operating in public view after the case was closed.

The federal government proved the vulnerability in court. Prosecutors named the defendants, documented the scheme, extracted guilty pleas, and imposed sentences. That part of the story is finished. What the public record shows in the FMCSA SAFER database, the Training Provider Registry, and California Secretary of State filings is that the ecosystem the scheme created has not been fully dismantled. It has adapted. It operates under new entity names, sometimes with the same phone numbers and addresses, sometimes with new ones. It carries U.S. Mail. It trains entry-level CDL applicants. And it shows up, right now, if you know where to look.

That is not an accusation against everyone in the orbit. It is a demand for an answer from the regulators who are paid to audit this infrastructure and have not, at least publicly, done so.

The burden is not on the public to ignore these patterns. The burden is on the agencies that hold the data to demonstrate that their systems are built to detect them. Until that demonstration is made, the loop will keep looping.

Methodology and Source Note

This report relies on: (1) Federal case summaries and press releases from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California and the DOT Office of Inspector General; (2) FMCSA SAFER carrier profile records, including identity, contact, and inspection data; (3) FMCSA Training Provider Registry listings; (4) California Secretary of State entity filings; (5) Property and UCC records from public aggregators; (6) Commercial carrier association tools that cross-reference phone numbers, addresses, and equipment VINs across FMCSA data. All identifier linkages described in this report are documented record matches, not interpretive inferences. All entity statuses are as of March 1–2, 2026. No entity or individual was found guilty of new crimes by this report. Questions of current criminal conduct are for law enforcement, not journalism.

Rob Carpenter is VP of Compliance at TruckSafe Consulting, founder of theteaintel.com, and a contributor to FreightWaves. He has 25+ years of experience in commercial transportation, holds a CDL, CDS and CDM/E certifications, and serves as an expert witness in highway accident litigation.

Three weeks ago, THE TEA didn’t exist. I had an idea, 25 years of trucking experience, and absolutely no idea how to code. If you are paying close attention, or continue to pay close enough attention over the next 60 days, you might notice some very familiar features showing up in some very predictable places on platforms that have changed very little in 12 months and suddenly started astrotrufing their sites since I started my build.

Today, it’s 53 pages of carrier intelligence, 14 federal API integrations, 4.3 million carriers, 4.8 million crash records, 13.3 million violations, and a proprietary risk scoring algorithm applied to 2.1 million motor carriers.

My developer team is me. My venture capital is my career, 120-hour work weeks, and a prayer. My product roadmap was “I’ve needed this for 25 years, and nobody built it, so I guess I will.” I didn’t do this because I needed a job.

I’m not here to farm engagement in hopes of finding employment or a leg up in life. I already built that for myself.

Next week, the paywall goes up. Before it does, let me tell you what this platform actually is, because it’s not what most people think. Frankly, a few people in this space seem very interested in finding out.

This Was Never About Building a Platform

I did not want to build THE TEA.

For the past year, I approached multiple groups and platforms in the carrier intelligence space about building what I needed. I came to them as a prospect. As a partner. As a guy with 25 years of fleet experience, a consulting business that needed better tools, and a very clear vision of what the industry was missing. I sat in calls. I shared ideas. I explained the use cases. I laid out exactly what a risk-control-focused carrier intelligence system should look like, how it should score carriers, how insurance data should be cross-referenced, and how fleet triage should work.

Some seemed interested. Communication fell apart. Some didn’t want to do it. Some were moving too slowly. Whatever the reason, the partnerships never materialized. What eventually materialized, with remarkable timing, was a sudden burst of innovation from platforms that had been static for over a year.

But we’ll get to that.

I wrote an article about coopetition a couple of weeks ago. I meant every word of it. I believe in brotherhood over broken markets. I believe platforms pulling from the same FMCSA data can serve different stakeholders and coexist. I’ve spent my career pushing this industry forward and lifting people up along the way. You can spend decades helping other people succeed and building goodwill, and some of those same people will still walk right over you the moment they think they can take what’s yours and call it their own.

So here’s what I learned: protect what you’ve built. Document everything. Timestamp everything. When the people you tried to collaborate with decide to compete using the ideas you handed them, make sure the receipts are public, permanent, and devastating.

Every feature below has a verified deployment timestamp from our build platform’s log, down to the minute. This is not a blog post. This is a build record. Build records don’t lie.

The Risk Control Problem Nobody Else Will Fix

Everything I’m about to describe, the 53 features, the APIs, the scoring engine, exists for one reason. It powers a product that does not exist anywhere else on the planet. Not in any form. Not from any company. Not from any platform that suddenly decided to start innovating in February 2026.

That product is a scalable, off-site, fleet-specific risk control triage system for insurance underwriters, litigation teams, PE due diligence, captive prospect assessments, broker marketing packages, and fleet improvement programs.

Let me explain why that matters, because most people outside the insurance world have no idea how broken this process is.

When an insurance company wants to assess a motor carrier before granting coverage or at renewal, they hire a risk control firm. That firm sends somebody on-site. That somebody spends 20 to 40 hours at the fleet, travel time, field time, report writing time, and whatever other categories of billable hours they can think of. At $200 to $300 an hour, you’re looking at $4,000 to $12,000 for a single assessment. Sometimes more.

First problem: you don’t always need that. Some of these fleets have excellent compliance and safety programs. Spending 20 to 40 hours on-site at a well-run fleet is a complete waste of money. A proper data review could have told you that in minutes.

Second problem, and it’s worse: the people these firms send are often OSHA generalists or industrial hygienists. Workplace safety specialists. Not fleet specialists. So they spend 20 to 40 hours at a 2,000-truck operation and come back saying “we’re not really familiar enough with the fleet side.” Now you need a fleet-specific professional to do it again. Same fleet. Same purpose. Double the bill. I know this because I’m the guy they call to go do the second visit.

Third problem, and the one nobody in this industry wants to say out loud: the people who DO understand fleet-specific risk control have no incentive to change this model. Because 10 to 40 hours of on-site time, billed at premium rates, often at a nice fleet facility in a decent city, that’s a paid vacation. Fly somewhere nice. Walk around a terminal. Check some boxes. Eat a nice lunch on the client’s dime. Write the report on the flight home. Bill the full 40. Why would anyone disrupt a system that pays them handsomely to do what amounts to light tourism with a clipboard?

That’s why nobody else built what we built. Not because they couldn’t. Because they didn’t want to. The broken model is profitable for the people inside it.

I’m one of maybe a handful of people in this country who do fleet-exclusive risk control at a professional level, not compliance consulting, risk control. Understanding the difference between those two things is the entire point. A fleet can be fully compliant with every federal regulation on the books and still have massive risk exposure. Compliance means you checked the boxes. Risk control means you actually examined the policies, the language, the workflows, the processes, the gaps, and the exposure points to make sure that when the catastrophe happens, and it will happen, you have a defensible program and a defensible position to fight from.

There are very few of us who do this work at the level required. Dan McBride is one. There are a few others. The list is short because the required expertise is unrealistic. You need to understand fleet operations, safety management systems, FMCSA regulatory frameworks, insurance underwriting, litigation exposure, claims analysis, driver management, maintenance programs, and the business of trucking itself, not from a textbook, but from having actually done every one of those jobs. CDL driver. Freight broker. Fleet executive. Private equity fleet oversight. Fortune 500 consulting. Expert witness. That’s not a resume line. That’s the minimum qualification to tell an underwriter whether a fleet is actually safe or just appears to be.

Nobody can copy that. Not in three weeks. Not in three years. Not by looking at my sidebar and adding tabs to their site. It’s fun to watch them try.

What THE TEA Actually Is, And Exactly When We Built It

THE TEA is the engine that powers the risk control product. Every feature was designed to deliver one outcome: better intelligence into the hands of people who make underwriting, litigation, and fleet safety decisions.

The dates below are verified against our build platform’s deployment log, timestamped to the minute. This is not an estimate. This is not a recollection. This is the record. I’d encourage anyone building similar features on their own platform to keep equally detailed records. For comparison purposes.

February 12, 2026, Night One

At 8:45 PM EST, the first deployment went live. Dark-theme UI framework. database connected. 4.3 million carrier records, 4.8 million crash records, 13.3 million violation records loaded from FMCSA bulk data.

In the next 41 minutes:

• Cluster Map (8:53 PM), Geographic carrier clustering by state

• Shared Identifiers + Insurance Scorecard + RRG Scorecard (9:01 PM), 78,861 phone numbers shared by 2+ carriers. 18,248 shared emails. 7,871 shared addresses. Insurers are ranked by the aggregate danger of carriers they cover. Risk Retention Group analysis. Three major analytical tools in one deployment

• Crash Intelligence (9:09 PM), Crash records, crash geography, crash rates across 4.8 million records

• Master Deep Analysis (9:16 PM), 14-layer chameleon detection engine. Composite fraud scoring. Color-coded. 0-100

• Network Investigations (9:22 PM), Search by officer, phone, or address to map connected carrier networks

Six analytical frameworks. Forty-one minutes. If anyone else in this space deployed anything comparable on this date, I’m sure the records will show it, and we wouldve had my product a year ago.

February 13, 2026, Live Data

Platform connected to real FMCSA data:

• FMCSA Proxy Edge Function (9:09 PM), Direct federal carrier record connection

• Leaflet Maps (9:11 PM), Interactive dark-themed mapping across all pages

• Dynamic Cluster Map (9:16 PM), Live data clustering

• Road Reports (9:29 PM), Crowdsourced field intelligence from the highway

• All Tables Wired Live (9:28–9:40 PM), Every page pulling real federal data

February 14, 2026, Hold My Beer

Nineteen-hour build day. I probably should have eaten something. I did not.

Before sunrise (4:51 AM – 6:51 AM):

• Analytics engine wired to live data with database aggregates and range filtering

• VIN Tracker enhanced, individual trucks tracked across carrier authorities

• Officer Investigations (6:26 AM), Type a name, see every DOT they touch across every state

• Government Freight (6:27 AM), Which carriers haul DOD ammunition, DHS cargo, DOE hazmat, and their safety profiles

• Insurer Comparison & Explorer (6:51 AM), Side-by-side insurer analysis

• Risk Digest (7:01 AM), Executive intelligence summary

• Watchlist (7:04 AM), Flag and monitor carriers with change detection. This is the feature that lets you watch a carrier deteriorate in real time before it becomes a claim. Or a verdict. Deployed at 7:04 AM on February 14, 2026. If a similar feature appears on another platform after this date, the record is here

• Address Intelligence (7:56 AM), Map visualization of addresses with multiple carrier registrations. Residential home in Harvey, Illinois, with 15 DOT numbers? Now visible

• The Scandal Sheet (7:59 AM), The most egregious statistical findings formatted for the kind of sharing that makes people uncomfortable

• High Violation Carriers (8:16 AM), Fleet-normalized violation leaderboard. A 3-truck outfit with 200 violations ranks above a 500-truck carrier with 200 violations because risk density matters

Midday (12:48 PM – 2:52 PM):

• Crash Geography (12:58 PM), Interactive US map. County-level crash density. Filterable by year and fatality involvement

• Violation Search (1:31 PM), Live real-time violation lookup querying FMCSA directly

• CSA Safety Profile (1:39 PM), Estimate BASIC percentile scores as visual gauges. All seven categories. Not estimated. Real

• Violation Intelligence (1:45 PM), Violation codes, severity weights, BASIC categories

• Government Money Trail (1:46 PM), Federal spending cross-referenced with carrier safety

• ELP Enforcement Map (2:52 PM), English Language Proficiency violation heat map. Which states enforce? Which don’t

Afternoon, Money and Security (3:21 PM – 6:51 PM):

• User Authentication with RBAC (3:21 PM), Role-based access control

• Tier-Based Feature Gating (5:22 PM), Four-tier subscription architecture

• Stripe Payment Automation (6:51 PM), Webhook-driven tier management

• Carrier Risk Score V2 (8:06 PM), Deployed across 2.1 million carriers. Five weighted domains. Fleet-bucketed normalization. This scoring methodology is proprietary. It is not a letter grade. Not a thumbs up. A number backed by math that nobody else in this space has published

• Violation History (8:19 PM), Complete violation history feature

• Foreign Labor Pipeline (10:08 PM), DOL PERM/H-2A/H-2B visa data cross-referenced against carrier registrations

Fourteen federal API integrations completed this day: five FMCSA SODA APIs (Census, SMS Violations with 6.5M records, SMS Inspections, SMS BASIC Scores, Insurance), Insurance History, Authority History, BOC-3 Process Agents, FMCSA QCMobile with webkey auth, three NHTSA APIs (VIN Decoder, Recalls, Complaints), USASpending.gov, and DOGE.

One day. One person. No coding experience. Some people in this space spend a year not building this much. Interesting.

February 15, 2026, Reports, Intelligence Briefs, The Rob Report

• PDF Report Generation Engine (7:49 AM), Downloadable intelligence products

• Compliance Assessment Report (7:54 AM)

• Risk & Safety Profile Report (8:00 AM)

• Intelligence Brief (8:03 AM), With methodology sections

• Fleet RCA Framework (11:50 AM), Risk Control Assessment pages deployed in the sidebar and routing

• RCA Report Page (1:14 PM), Full risk control assessment report viewer with admin RBAC

• Shipper Intelligence (4:26 PM), Which shippers are tendering loads to high-risk carriers

• DOGE Cross-Reference (4:59 PM), Government efficiency spending analysis

• The Rob Report / About Page (6:16 PM), Career timeline, credentials, FreightWaves articles, podcast, “By the Numbers” stats

• Federal Awards (6:37 PM), USASpending.gov top federal awards to carriers

Four downloadable intelligence report types. Domain connected. theteaintel.com live. One person who should probably eat something but won’t because there are 14 more features to ship.

February 16, 2026, Screening, Repeat Offenders, Address Clusters, Embed Widget

• Repeat Offenders (5:34 AM), Recurring violation pattern detection across multiple inspections. Chronic non-compliance versus one-time citations. Deployed at 5:34 in the morning because apparently I don’t sleep

• Address Clusters (6:36 AM), Proximity clustering with address normalization. Suite 100, Unit 100, Ste 100, same building, now matched

• Red Flag Report (7:46 AM), Downloadable red flag intelligence report

• Watchlist Enhanced (7:41 AM), Stats dashboard for monitored carriers

• Embed Widget (7:51 AM), Embeddable carrier intelligence lookup for third-party sites

• Carrier Screening (2:16 PM), Pre-hire pass/fail tool for brokers, 3PLs, shippers. Green light, yellow light, red light. A 30-second answer on whether to tender a load. Decision-grade guidance, not a data dump

• Cross-Reference Intelligence (9:02 PM), Live SODA-powered cross-referencing with universal search

February 17, 2026, Reincarnation Detection, Super Ego, QCMobile

• QCMobile Live Integration (4:51 AM–5:34 AM), Real-time carrier status from FMCSA powering OOS banners and enforcement alerts

• Reincarnation Detection (6:07 AM), Cross-references every new authority registration against every inactive carrier by officer, phone, address, and email. Two or more matches? Gold CHAMELEON RISK banner. This is chameleon detection at birth, not after four people die in Indiana. Deployed February 17, 2026, at 6:07 AM. If another platform launches something similar after this date, that’s a coincidence I’d love to hear them explain

• Super Ego Investigation Page (12:46 PM), Dedicated dossier on the largest documented chameleon carrier network in the country. 33+ affiliated entities. Serbian offshore structure. ELD manipulation. Class action with 10,000-20,000 potential plaintiffs. Expanded through 6:32 PM with legal qualifiers

February 19, 2026, The Centerpiece: Risk Control Intake

This is the day that matters most. Not because of the number of features. Because of what went live at 3:34 PM.

• Dashboard Merged with Carrier Lookup (3:58 AM), Unified command center

• Insurer Lookup Enhanced (4:44 AM): Search any insurance company; see every carrier they cover with full safety profiles. The reverse lookup, the insurance industry has never had

• Universal Multi-Source Search (4:32 AM), One search bar across all data

• TEA Estimated SMS Scores (2:50 PM), Proprietary estimated BASIC scores for carriers without published percentiles

• Violation Trend Analysis (3:20 PM), Violation patterns over time

• Risk Control Intake Page (3:34 PM), This is it. The centerpiece of the entire platform. The page that connects the intelligence engine to the product that does not exist anywhere else on Earth. Submit fleet information → triggers questionnaire → FMCSA live data pull → cross-reference what the fleet says against what the federal record shows → contradiction analysis → 0-100 graded risk control assessment report → expert review by certified fleet professionals → delivered within 24 hours. This replaces $4,000-$12,000 on-site assessments with targeted, fleet-expert-reviewed remote triage. Deployed February 19, 2026, at 3:34 PM EST. If anyone claims they had this idea first, the timestamp is right here. Given that this is what I do for a living, we know there are very, very few in this industry that do this kind of work.

• Risk Control Intake Expanded (4:12 PM–4:30 PM), Exposed in sidebar and header. Agent/Broker requestor option. Multi-step intake. PE/Due Diligence fields. The full workflow for every use case: underwriting, litigation, captive assessments, broker marketing packages, fleet improvement

• PWA Support (4:22 PM), Progressive Web App. Install THE TEA on your phone or desktop

February 20, 2026, PPP, Admin Console, ELDT Suite, Network Reports

• Carrier Connection System (3:39 AM), Network graph showing carrier-to-carrier connections

• Network Report PDF (3:47 AM), Downloadable network intelligence reports

• PPP Intelligence (7:04 AM), Paycheck Protection Program loans cross-referenced with carrier safety records and revocations. Taxpayer money that funded fraud is now visible. State drilldown, clickable borrowers

• Admin Intelligence Console (7:15 AM), Platform analytics dashboard. User activity, search patterns, metrics

• Risk Control HOW THIS WORKS (8:24 AM), Seven-step visual workflow on the risk control page

• RCA PDF Export Enhanced (8:48 AM–9:06 AM), Report generation with BASIC data, insurance, and crash sync

• Fleet Assessment (9:17 AM), Multi-carrier portfolio risk analysis for underwriters

• ELDT Training Schools (5:34 PM), 5,390 providers with an interactive map, cross-referenced against carrier registrations. CDL school at the same address as a revoked carrier? Now you can see it

• ELDT Intelligence Suite (5:57 PM–8:01 PM), Full deployment: ELD Registry, Carrier Cross-Reference, Network Clusters, Operator Profiles, D3 network visualization, provider mapping, Leaflet integration

February 21, 2026, Federal Intelligence Expansion

• Historical Connections (9:17 AM), Historical carrier connection tracking

• SAM Exclusions Intelligence (11:39 AM), Federal debarment data. Entities excluded from government contracts are cross-referenced against carrier registrations. Tiered risk badges. If you’ve been debarred by the federal government and you’re still running trucks, this page shows it

• Federal Debarment Page (2:37 PM), Dedicated navigation for exclusion data

• Federal Intelligence Expanded (3:15 PM), Multi-table cross-referencing. Entity link badges across Carrier, ELDT, and Road Reports. SAM exclusions crossover. CSV export. Dynamic “Got Federal Money” flag

February 23 – March 2, 2026, Paid Tiers, Polish, Documentation

Paid tier structure finalized across all 53 pages. Four tiers with feature gating, Stripe checkout, webhook-driven activation, promo codes built and tested. Network Investigations redesigned. Violation Intelligence expanded. Platform optimization across every page. Insurance scoring white paper data system finalized.

Yesterday, March 2, 2026, the complete build manifest was documented. Every feature. Every deployment timestamp. Every API. Every analytical framework. Published permanently. Because receipts matter. Especially in an industry where people suddenly start innovating the week after they see your work, when their aggregate platforms haven’t had meaningful changes in 12 months.

53 features. 21 days. One person who probably needs to go outside more. But not yet. There’s one more section.

The Insurance Scoring Engine, And Why It Exists

The Insurance Intelligence suite wasn’t built because we wanted a dashboard. It was built because the insurance industry has a problem it refuses to quantify, and we needed the data infrastructure to prove it.

The best insurers in the market, the ones running group captives and traditional underwritten programs, are covering the best fleets because they actually evaluate who they put their name behind. The worst insurers are writing non-underwritten subprime instant-issue coverage for carriers that can’t survive a real underwriting process. No review. No assessment. Just an algorithm and a premium. I wrote about this in my FreightWaves column. The response confirmed what we already knew: the industry recognizes the problem, but no one has built a system to measure it at scale.

So we built it. Insurance Scorecard was deployed on February 12 at 9:01 PM. Insurer Comparison and Explorer on February 14 at 6:51 AM. Insurer Lookup on February 19. Insurance Intelligence expanded throughout the build.

We’re now producing a white paper on insurer quality as a predictor of carrier safety outcomes. THE TEA’s insurance scoring engine generates the data used to build the white paper. Which insurers cover the most dangerous carriers in America? Which RRGs are writing policies no traditional underwriter would touch? What does aggregate crash exposure look like by insurer? That data feeds directly into our risk control assessments. When we produce a preliminary fleet triage report for an underwriter, the insurer quality data is part of the picture, because who insures a fleet tells you as much about that fleet as its violation history does.

Nobody else built this system because nobody else in this space does the work that needs it. They don’t need insurer quality data. They need a phone number and an email address. We need the data that tells an underwriter whether their portfolio is trending toward a nuclear verdict. Different tools for different jobs. That’s coopetition. Unless, of course, someone copies the tool and pretends they thought of it themselves. Then it’s just theft with better branding.

What’s Protectable, And Why I’m Telling You

I don’t usually publish an IP strategy in a Substack article. But given the circumstances, given that the ideas I shared in good faith over the past year are now appearing on platforms that had no interest in building them until I built them myself, I think transparency is appropriate.

Trade Dress: The overall look, feel, navigation structure, dark-theme intelligence, aesthetic, card-based data presentation, sidebar organization, and user experience of THE TEA platform. If another platform starts looking remarkably similar to ours after February 2026, the deployment timestamps document exactly when every design element went live.

Copyright: Every word of written content on this platform. The Scandal Sheet narratives. The Context Library. The Super Ego investigation dossier. The Rob Report. The risk control intake language. Copyrighted automatically upon creation.

Proprietary Analytical Frameworks, The V2 Carrier Risk Score: five weighted domains, fleet-bucketed peer normalization, 2x driver violation weighting. The 14-layer chameleon detection framework. The reincarnation detection cross-referencing logic. The insurance quality scoring methodology. The contradiction analysis engine is used in our risk control assessment.

The Risk Control Assessment Product is the off-site fleet triage methodology. The 120-question instrument. The cross-referencing of fleet self-reported data against FMCSA records. The contradiction analysis. The 0-100 graded output. The 24-hour delivery framework. This product does not exist anywhere else. It is not a feature someone can add to a website. It is a professional service powered by a purpose-built intelligence system, delivered by certified fleet risk control specialists who have spent decades doing the actual work. You cannot replicate it by adding a tab to your site. But I suspect someone will try.

Who This Is For

Insurance Underwriters, Carrier risk intelligence before binding coverage. Our score and assessment tell you whether a fleet is actually safe, not just whether they filed the right paperwork.

Litigation Attorneys, Plaintiff or defense. A preliminary risk breakdown assessed by fleet professionals gives you a foundation most trucking attorneys don’t have because most trucking attorneys don’t understand trucking.

Insurance Agents & Brokers, Marketing packages to shop for clients for better rates. A professional risk control assessment in the package changes the conversation entirely.

Private Equity & Investment Firms, Pre-acquisition due diligence. You’re about to buy a trucking company. Do you know what their FMCSA record actually means?

TPAs & Risk Managers, Deterioration detection before it becomes a claim. Before it becomes a verdict.

Captive Programs, Prospect assessments. Is this carrier captive-worthy? The report tells you.

State Enforcement & FMCSA New Entrant Screening: New entrants operate for 12 to 18 months before the audit arrives. A 21-day off-site triage screens applicants before authority is issued.

Fleet Owners & Carriers, know your risk position before your insurer does. Fix the gaps before they become claims.

What’s Coming Next Week

THE TEA moves to a paid subscription model:

Free, Unlimited carrier searches with basic SAFER-level data. Dashboard overview. Crash geography and ELP enforcement in view-only. Enough to see what we built.

Starter ($20/month), Full CSA Safety Profiles with BASIC scores. Violation intelligence. Crash rates. Insurance coverage. Government Money Trail. Foreign Carriers. Intelligence Brief downloads.

Pro ($49/month), Everything in Starter plus officer/owner contact intel. Chameleon detection flags. Insurance Scorecard with insurer quality ratings. VIN Tracker. High Violation Carriers. Address Intelligence. CSV exports. Red Flag Report downloads.

Enterprise ($299/month), Everything. Network Investigations. Officer Investigations. Master Deep Analysis. Shared Identifiers. The Scandal Sheet. Analytics. Watchlist. API access. All four intelligence report types. Plus $150 off a professional Risk Control Assessment from TruckSafe Consulting, because the same person who built this platform also conducts the assessments, and that’s kind of the whole point.

The platform feeds the assessments. The assessments are the product. The product is what no one else has. That’s the architecture. That’s the business. That’s the point.

What Nobody Else Can Copy

You can copy a feature list. You can look at someone’s platform and start adding similar pages to yours. People do it all the time. It’s happening right now, in this space, as you read this article. Some of them are reading this article specifically to figure out what to add next. Hi. Welcome. Bookmark the dates.

You cannot copy 25 years of doing the work.

You cannot copy the ability to sit across from an insurance underwriter and explain, from personal experience in every role, exactly where a fleet’s risk exposure lives, why their current risk control process is missing it, and how a triage instrument cross-referenced against live FMCSA data produces a more accurate preliminary assessment in 24 hours than a generalist produces in 40 on-site hours.

You cannot copy the relationships with FMCSA administrators, DOT officials, and federal enforcement professionals that come from decades of credibility built one investigation, one article, one expert testimony at a time.

You cannot copy the risk control assessment product, because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Not because the technology is complicated. Because the expertise required to build it doesn’t exist in the people building carrier intelligence platforms. They’re technologists. They’re aggregators. They build tools. They do not assess fleets. They have never sat across from an underwriter and explained why a carrier’s crash frequency, combined with its claims exposure and policy language, creates a liability that no amount of compliant paperwork can fix.

Context isn’t a screenshot. Experience isn’t a UI element. A risk control product built by someone who’s done every job in this industry for 25 years cannot be replicated by someone who spent 25 minutes looking at his feature list. Though I do appreciate the flattery.

So…what?

53 features. 14 federal APIs. 4.3 million carriers. 4.8 million crashes. 13.3 million violations. 2.1 million carriers scored. 211,427 out-of-service orders. 5,390 ELDT schools mapped. Zero VC. Zero developers. Zero coding experience. One person. 25 years. 21 days.

Every feature has a verified deployment timestamp. The build record is permanent.

I tried to partner. I shared ideas in good faith with platforms that hadn’t changed in over a year. When those partnerships didn’t materialize, I instead began creating using the discussed data and information from the proposed partnerships, and I built what I needed. And when I started building publicly, some of those same platforms suddenly discovered an urgent desire to innovate.

I’d encourage anyone interested in the evolution of trucking data platforms to bookmark this article and revisit it periodically. Timelines are fascinating things. They’d be more fascinating if we discussed prior potential partnerships and the data shared there, vs. what's been built since.

The market builds aggregation tools. We build decision-making intelligence that powers a risk-control product no one else on Earth has created, because no one else has spent 25 years doing every job in this industry and then decided to turn that into a system.

I didn’t build THE TEA to compete. But now I realize why the private equity world was so dog-eat-dog when I was in it. They had to be. There are zero friends in this vendor solutions space and business, and if you build it, someone will steal it. Or theyll try. I built it because I needed a tool to do my actual job, assessing fleets, supporting underwriters, providing litigation intelligence, and making highways safer. The platform is the engine. The risk control assessment is the product. The product exists because one person got tired of waiting for everyone else to build it.

The data doesn’t lie. Neither do we.

theteaintel.com

We don’t aggregate. We originate.

Now you know.

Interactive Power Grid Crisis Map

Something isn’t adding up in Virginia. Virginia’s skyrocketing electric bills aren’t an anomaly; they’re the canary in the coal mine. The same data centers running your TMS and load boards are consuming so much power that they’re breaking the grid serving America’s busiest freight corridors. Cold storage operators, reefer carriers, and shippers are about to feel every kilowatt. Homeowners are staring at electric bills they’ve never seen. Landlords with completely vacant properties, no appliances running, and thermostats barely set above freeze protection are getting hit with $700 bills. One property investor I know is averaging nearly $20,000 a month in electricity across a portfolio of empty renovation homes. Virginia’s rates surged 13% in the most recent year-over-year comparison. Dominion Energy just got its first base rate increase approved since 1992.

If this were only a Virginia story, it would still matter. Virginia sits at one of the most critical intersections of port infrastructure, cold storage, and temperature-controlled distribution on the East Coast. But this isn’t just Virginia.

It’s Illinois, where electric prices jumped 16%. In Ohio, they climbed 12%. Georgia, where monthly Georgia Power bills have increased six times in two years and now average $175 a month. Maryland, where wholesale price spikes have pushed some residential bills up 80% in three years. It’s New Jersey. Pennsylvania. Indiana. Washington, D.C., where rates spiked a staggering 33% year over year.

The primary driver behind the surge is data centers. The same server farms running your AI tools, your load boards, your TMS platforms and your ELD backends are consuming so much electricity that they’re fundamentally distorting power markets across the country.

The supply chain, especially the cold chain, is absorbing the cost.

Before we get into what this means for freight, you need to understand that data centers didn’t create America’s grid vulnerability. They exposed one that’s been building for 30 years. The server farms are the accelerant. The kindling was stacked by a series of policy decisions, market restructurings and infrastructure neglect that systematically stripped resilience out of the U.S. power grid.

Start with deregulation. In 1996, California became the first state to deregulate its electricity market. The promise was that competition would drive prices down. By 2000, energy traders, most notoriously Enron, had figured out how to game the system. They took power plants offline during peak demand to manufacture shortages. They bought California electricity at capped prices, shipped it out of state and sold it back at multiples. Wholesale prices surged 800% in eight months. PG&E went bankrupt. Rolling blackouts hit millions. The crisis cost the state an estimated $40 billion to $45 billion.

The lesson should have been clear. It wasn’t. Today, 18 states plus D.C. have some form of electricity deregulation, and the numbers tell the story: as of March 2025, average electricity prices in deregulated states sit at 21.66 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 15.33 cents in regulated states. That’s 41% higher. And nearly every state getting hammered right now, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, is a deregulated, competitive-market state.

Then came the great coal retirement. Between 2010 and early 2019, power companies retired more than 546 coal-fired units totaling roughly 102 gigawatts of capacity. A record 14.9 GW went offline in 2015 alone. By the end of 2026 the United States will have shut down half its total coal generation capacity, dropping from a peak of 318 GW in 2011 to about 159 GW. Coal’s share of U.S. electricity fell from 51% in 2001 to roughly 19.5% by 2022.

Those coal plants were baseload generation. They ran around the clock. When they were retired, they were mostly replaced by natural gas, which introduced price volatility, and by wind and solar, which are intermittent and require backup capacity and grid storage that doesn’t yet exist at scale. Here’s what matters: 58% of planned coal retirements through 2028 are concentrated in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, the same PJM Interconnection footprint where data center demand is surging fastest. We are removing generation capacity from the exact geography where demand is exploding.

Nuclear is just as bad. Twelve U.S. reactors permanently closed between 2013 and 2021, every single one in a deregulated, competitive market. Academic research found that each closure increased state-level carbon emissions by 6% to 8% because the grid substituted dirtier fossil-fuel generation. Twenty other reactors were saved from closure only through state subsidies totaling roughly $100 million per reactor per year in Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Now the tech companies driving the data center boom are scrambling to restart nuclear plants and build new ones. Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1. The industry spent a decade shutting down nuclear plants and is now spending billions to bring them back because the grid can’t support the load without them.

Layered on top of it all are the renewable portfolio standards that 29 states enacted over the past two decades. A comprehensive University of Chicago study found that those mandates increased retail electricity prices by 11% within seven years and 17% within 12 years. Consumers in those 29 states paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have without the policies. The hidden costs, backup capacity for intermittency, massive new transmission lines to reach remote generation sites, and premature displacement of existing baseload power were larger than most analyses ever accounted for.

Each of these structural shifts added a few percentage points to electricity costs. They compounded quietly for years while prices remained flat at around 13 cents per kWh from roughly 2007 to 2019. Then data centers arrived at an industrial scale, and the whole thing blew open.

The epicenter of the damage is the PJM Interconnection territory, the largest power grid in the United States, serving 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. PJM covers Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

It’s not just the grid. It’s the backbone of East Coast and Midwest logistics. Inside PJM’s footprint, you’ll find the Port of Virginia, the Port of Baltimore, Port Newark-Elizabeth, the Chicago intermodal hub, the I-95 corridor, the I-81 freight corridor, and the I-70/I-80 Midwest distribution belt. The densest concentration of cold storage, warehousing and freight infrastructure in North America sits on this grid.

Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 alone, double the amount from the same period in 2024. Rate increases affected about 40 million customers. Residential electricity prices rose 11.5% in 2025, outpacing inflation, and the EIA projects prices could increase up to 40% more by 2030. Average national electricity prices climbed from 13 cents per kWh in 2019 to 19 cents by the end of 2025. Forty-four states and D.C. saw year-over-year cost increases in December 2025.

PJM runs capacity auctions to ensure enough generation exists to keep the grid reliable. In 2024 the auction for the 2025-2026 delivery year produced a bill of $14.7 billion, a more than 500% increase from the prior year’s $2.2 billion. An independent watchdog found that data center demand accounted for $9.3 billion of that total, roughly 63%. The following auction jumped another 10% to $16.1 billion. A Union of Concerned Scientists analysis tallied $4.3 billion in direct costs passed to consumers in 2024 across just seven PJM states, identifying 130 examples of utilities connecting data centers with expensive new transmission lines while passing costs to ratepayers under outdated rules.

PJM has warned that from 2026 the grid will have just enough capacity to maintain reliability. Data centers are connecting faster than new generation can be built, and PJM currently has no mechanism to stop those connections even when reliability is at risk.

Not all commercial electricity users are created equal. Cold storage is uniquely exposed because of the sheer intensity of its power consumption.

A refrigerated warehouse burns through approximately 25 kilowatt-hours per square foot annually, four to five times more than a standard commercial building. Refrigeration accounts for up to 70% of total operating costs. According to the Global Cold Chain Alliance, electric power represents about 10% of total cold storage expenses and utility costs overall can run 9% to 18% of revenue for cold chain operators.

When rates jump 10% to 15%, the math moves fast. A 100,000-square-foot facility consuming 2.5 million kWh annually absorbs tens of thousands in additional annual costs. For operators like Lineage Logistics, the world’s largest cold storage company with facilities spread across multiple PJM states, or Americold with its own extensive network, the aggregate exposure runs into the millions per year. Those costs don’t evaporate. They flow into per-pallet storage rates, handling fees, drayage surcharges, and the price per case for every temperature-controlled SKU that moves through the supply chain.

I’ve spent 25 years in this industry. I’ve watched cost pressures come and go. This one is different because it’s structural rather than cyclical. It doesn’t correct when demand softens or diesel dips. It’s embedded in the grid, baked into capacity auction results and compounding annually. And it hits every link in the cold chain simultaneously.

Virginia’s Port of Virginia processed 3.5 million TEUs in fiscal year 2024 and is pouring $1.4 billion into its Gateway Investment Program. Hampton Roads has 3 million square feet of freezer and cooler space within 20 minutes of port terminals. Lineage operates 12 facilities across the state. FreezPak just invested $77.5 million in a new 245,000-square-foot cold storage facility in Suffolk. Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor, is headquartered. The Dominion zone within PJM is projected to see a 121% increase in peak load by 2045. Georgia’s Port of Savannah has more refrigerated container capacity than any other East or Gulf Coast terminal. The state has 67 cold chain facilities with 189 million cubic feet of space, and its own utility regulator found roughly 80% of projected demand growth is driven by data centers. Illinois is a Midwest freight and intermodal powerhouse where rates jumped 16% and the governor signed emergency energy legislation in January 2026 because officials warned the state could face shortages. Indiana is now home to Amazon’s largest AI data center, 30 buildings planned across 1,200 acres in New Carlisle, and saw estimated monthly bills jump 20.9% in a single year.

The states with the highest data center concentrations overlap almost perfectly with the states anchoring America’s freight and cold chain infrastructure. That’s not a coincidence. Data centers are located in logistics corridors because they need the same things: highway access, fiber connectivity, proximity to population, and historically cheap power. They’re competing for the same grid, and commercial ratepayers are losing.

The industry should internalize the rising electricity costs in these corridors to directly compress reefer capacity and push trucking rates higher.

Start with the reefer fleet. Temperature-controlled trucking already operates on thinner margins than dry van because of the equipment cost premium and the fuel burden of running a refrigeration unit. A reefer unit burns roughly a gallon of diesel per hour, but it also depends on infrastructure that runs on electricity at every touch point: the cold storage warehouse where freight is staged, the cross-dock where it’s consolidated, the distribution center where it’s depalletized, and the grocery DC where it’s received. Every one of those facilities just got more expensive to operate in these states, and those costs are flowing into the rates those facilities charge carriers and shippers.

When cold storage operators raise per-pallet rates to cover electricity increases, that cost has to go somewhere. It gets baked into accessorial charges. It shows up in detention and demurrage fees because facilities dealing with higher costs have less patience for free time. It pressures transload operations. And it ultimately flows into linehaul rates because carriers operating reefer equipment out of these corridors are absorbing higher terminal costs, higher staging costs and higher fuel costs all at once.

There’s a secondary capacity effect too. If operating costs in PJM-corridor states and Georgia become materially higher than competing regions, you could see cold storage development shift to lower-cost power markets. New facilities get built in the Carolinas, in Tennessee, in Texas. That migration doesn’t happen overnight, but it reshapes distribution networks over three to five years, and in the interim, existing capacity in high-cost states gets tighter as operators defer expansion or consolidate facilities to manage overhead. Tighter capacity means higher rates. It’s the same supply-demand dynamic that drives every freight cycle, just triggered by a variable nobody had in their models until now.

For reefer carriers specifically, the implications cascade. Owner-operators running temperature-controlled freight out of Hampton Roads or the Port of Savannah or the Chicago market are going to see their per-stop costs climb as warehouse and DC operators pass through electricity increases. Large fleets with their own terminal infrastructure in PJM states are absorbing those costs directly on their P&L. Either way, it pressures rates upward, and in a soft freight market, that means margin compression, not rate recovery.

There’s the electric truck paradox. The entire economic case for battery-electric freight was built on the assumption that electricity is cheaper per mile than diesel. That math was modeled on yesterday’s rates. A single megawatt-class charger for a Class 8 truck pulls as much power as an entire neighborhood. Fleet depot charging infrastructure can cost $50,000 to $250,000 per charger before grid upgrades. Demand charges can account for 30% to 70% of a commercial electricity bill. When the underlying rate structure is already inflated by data center-driven capacity costs, those demand charges become devastating. Any fleet evaluating electric truck deployment in the PJM corridor, in Georgia, or in Texas, where ERCOT estimates data center demand will exceed 22,000 MW by 2030, needs to model current and projected rates, not national averages from 2023.

Regulators are telling the trucking industry to electrify on a grid that can barely keep the lights on in vacant houses.

Perhaps the most infuriating finding in all of this is that the cost burden isn’t being distributed equally.

A Yale Climate Connections analysis found that residential electricity prices increased by 25% between 2020 and 2024. Commercial prices rose only about 3%. Industrial prices actually fell by 2%. Data centers are consuming more kilowatt-hours than ever, but the prices they pay have risen only marginally. In some cases, they’re negotiating favorable rate structures, receiving tax incentives, or interconnecting under rules designed for a completely different era.

In Georgia, two incumbent public utility commissioners were voted out in November 2025 after residential prices climbed 41% in four years. Virginia’s incoming governor, Abigail Spanberger, won in a landslide partly by promising to make data centers pay their fair share. New Jersey’s governor-elect campaigned explicitly on electricity costs. States such as Ohio and Georgia have begun creating separate rate classes for data centers, and Maryland is developing new tariff structures for large-load users.

Cold chain operators don’t get to negotiate sweetheart rates with their utility. They don’t get data center tax incentives. They don’t have lobbyists at the public utility commission. They just get the bill.

The data exists to independently verify whether rising costs reflect actual increases in electricity consumption or are purely pricing-driven. The EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor tracks real-time demand and generation for every balancing authority in the country. EIA Form 923 provides plant-level fuel consumption data by month. The EPA’s Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems provide hourly smokestack data from every major fossil fuel plant. If emissions are flat but bills are climbing, the story is pricing, not usage. PJM publishes wholesale pricing by zone so you can compare what the market is actually paying versus what’s hitting retail bills.

Cold chain operators, shippers, and carriers should be pulling this data and building it into procurement modeling. This isn’t a one-quarter blip. PJM’s load forecasts project sustained demand growth for the next 20 years. The era of flat, predictable, 13-cent-per-kWh electricity that lasted from 2007 to 2019 is over. It’s not coming back.

For every business that depends on electricity as a core operating input, cold storage, food processing, warehouse operations, fleet terminals, and truck charging, this isn’t a temporary rate cycle. It’s a permanent structural shift.

The grid is full. The cold chain is feeling it first. Your freight bill is next.

Key data sources: EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor; EIA Form 923; EPA CEMS; PJM Interconnection Market Data; Union of Concerned Scientists data center transmission cost analysis (October 2025); EESI data center power demand report (2026); Yale Climate Connections electricity price analysis (January 2026); CNBC data center electricity analysis (November 2025); NEADA Energy Price Update (November 2025); American Action Forum electricity price analysis (October 2025); Global Cold Chain Alliance Cold Chain Index; University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute RPS analysis; IEEFA coal retirement tracking; Hampton Roads Alliance; Georgia Department of Economic Development; Virginia SCC Case PUR-2025-00058.